My Year in a Log Cabin

by William Dean Howells

We had a poor fellow, named B——, for our saw-miller, whose sad fortunes are vividly associated with the loveliness of the early summer in my mind. He was a hapless, harmless, kindly creature, and he had passed most of his manhood in a sort of peonage to a rich neighboring farmer whom he was hopelessly in debt to, so that I suppose it was like the gift of freedom to him when he came into our employ; but his happiness did not last long.

Within a month or two he was seized with a flux that carried him off after a few days, and then began to attack his family. He had half a dozen children, and they all died, except one boy, who was left with his foolish, simple mother. My oldest brother had helped nurse them, and had watched with them, and seen them die; and it fell to me to go to the next village one morning and buy linen to make the last two of their shrouds. I mounted the italic-footed mare, barebacked, as usual, with my legs going to sleep on either side of her, but my brain wildly awake, and set out through the beautiful morning, turned lurid and ghastly by the errand on which I was bent.

When I came back with that linen in my hand it was as if I were accompanied by troops of sheeted dead, from whom that italic-footed nightmare could not be persuaded to escape by any sawing of her mouth, or any thumping of her sides with my bare heels.

I am astonished now that this terror should have been so transient. The little ones were laid with their father and their brothers and sisters in the unfenced graveyard on the top of our hill, where the pigs foraged for acorns above their heads in the fall; and then my sun shone again. So did the sun of the surviving B——s. The mother turned her household goods into ready money, and with this and the wages due her husband bought a changeable silk dress for herself and an oil-cloth cap for her son, and equipped in these splendors the two set off up the road towards the town of X——, gay, light-hearted in their destitution, and consoled after the bereavement of a single week.

X

Our new house got on slowly. There were various delays and some difficulties, but it was all intensely interesting, and we watched its growth with eyes that hardly left it night or day. Life in the log-cabin had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer; we were all impatient to be out of it. We looked forward to our occupation of the new house with an eagerness which even in us boys must have had some sense of present discomfort at the bottom of it. We were to have a parlor, a dining-room, and a library; there were to be three chambers for the family and a spare room; after six months in the log-cabin we could hardly have imagined it, if we had not seen these divisions actually made by the studding.

In that region there is no soft wood. The frame was of oak, and my father decided to have the house weather-boarded and shingled with black-walnut, which was so much cheaper than pine, and which, left in its natural state, he thought would be agreeable in color. In this neither the carpenter nor any of the neighbors could think with him; the local ideal was brick for a house, and if not that, then white paint and green blinds, and always two front doors; but my father had his way, and our home was fashioned according to his plans.

It appeared to me a palace. I spent all the leisure I had from swimming and Indian fighting and reading in watching the carpenter work, and hearing him talk; his talk was not the wisest, but he thought very well of it himself, and I had so far lapsed from civilization that I stood in secret awe of him, because he came from town—from the pitiful little village, namely, where I went to buy those shrouds.

I try to give merely a child’s impressions of our life, which were nearly all delightful; but it must have been hard for my elders, and for my mother especially, who could get no help, or only briefly and fitfully, in the work that fell to her. What her pleasures were I can scarcely imagine. She was cut off from church-going because we were Swedenborgians; short of Cincinnati, sixty miles away, there was no worship of our faith, and the local preaching was not edifying, theologically or intellectually.

Now and then a New Church minister, of those who used to visit us in town, passed a Sunday with us in the cabin, and that was a rare time of mental and spiritual refreshment. Otherwise, my father read us a service out of the Book of Worship, or a chapter from the Heavenly Arcana; and week-day nights, while the long evenings lasted, he read poetry to us—Scott or Moore or Thomson, or some of the more didactic poets.