Chapter One

There was a game that David loved.[1]

He called it Indian in the Corn.

In autumn, in the field beyond South Pasture, when the husks were built into tepees around the cobs of massive, orange-colored teeth, it was his favorite pastime as he bustled up and down the rustling aisles, to slip into a tepee’s heart. Lie there. Crouch there. Feel sinister there. And then, deep in his tepee, over the yellow mound of corn that was like a camp-fire, beat his palm against his open mouth and let out yips. Henry, when reading him _Leatherstocking Tales_ up in his room beside the old base-burner, used to yodel thus, against slaps at his opened mouth.

Never by chance did a farm-hand encounter the particular tepee that concealed David. Sometimes, to the simply irrepressible excitement of the small crouching figure whose eyes shone like a cat’s through apertures in the husks, they rustled perilously near. But never, even though they could hear him breathe, would hired man be guilty of finding out Davey.

That made it perennially exciting. Even if one suspected, at times, an elaborate and almost too consistent immunity to direction of sounds on the part of the field-workers. Still, one could never be quite sure. After all, in a wilderness of tepees that reached from the sheep pasture to the creek, one Indian chieftain might easily throw puzzlement, even consternation, into the less wily white man.

Tecumseh, Chief of the Shawnees, who had been prominent in border warfare in that very region where the Old Gentleman’s corn-field flowed its mellow way, was a favorite rôle.

The War of 1812 could bang in cap-pistol shots among those tepees.

There was a colored picture in one of his brother Henry’s books; _The Lewis and Clarke Expedition_, of a solitary chieftain skulking in and out of ambush, and a score of white men from behind a barricade, lying belly low, aiming rifles at just the wrong clump of bush.

Sometimes Jacob, known throughout the valley as the best farm hand in the state (when sober), would throw a fit at these yips emanating from the tepees, and dance up and down on the balls of his feet and rub the seat of his overalls.

That invariably delighted David into a spell of the short, hiccoughy laughter of childhood, and out he came, still yipping, and leaping about in a tribal dance of no authenticity, while Jacob, at sight of the small figure in the yellow khaki-suit overalls, with fringed sides, and the band of porcupine-quills made into a head-crest for him by his sister Rebekka, took to his heels, still rubbing.

Long hazy autumns, the color of an apricot, and of a spanking kind of heat, these years that led up to Davey’s being seven. Slow days, even as they grew shortest, that lay in a little yellow mud along the tongue and tasted of pollen.

All of his life David was to remember the taste of those days of his first seven years.

Once, in the full prime of his future, standing on the observation platform of a special train that was draped in bunting, and addressing a group of townspeople who had crowded up around the tracks of a station named Vandalia, the smell of that hot autumn haze, drifting in apricot-colored sunlight from outlying corn-fields, caught him so by the throat, that he terminated his remarks almost on a gulp and retired into the car to the rather bewildered cheers of the crowd.[2]

Those with him, accustomed to his grim, unrelenting sort of vitality, were surprised at this show of fatigue; and his young personal physician, named Denny Kiskadden, harboring memories of Wilson, Harding, and Putnam finally exacted from him a respite from the whirlwind demands upon his time and energy, and the next few towns were passed with the shades of the car drawn, and the milling crowds about the stations met with a few brief remarks from the Secretary of State.

But it was not fatigue. It was a memory assailing him along the taste nerves of his tongue. The taste of the smell of Indian summer drifting in over soil that was the soil of his being.

The old house on the edge of Centralia was packed with that odor into the very plush and horsehair of its furniture. Hard coal from the base-burners, and the smell of winter apples, and a curious smell that was sweet, like the breath of a cow, mingled with it the year through.

For years, during a sustained hiatus in the growth of Centralia, due to certain water-power monopolies that held up a foundry-development which was one day to boom it, the House on Sycamore Street continued virtually to mark the very spot where the bob-tailed town faded back into the placid geography of the meadow, field, and brook from whence it came.

From its square brace of front bay windows, you glimpsed the roofs of the sedentary houses for blocks along the shady length of Sycamore Street. But from its rear; from Henry’s window, or Davey’s attic one, or Trina’s, there uninterrupted, plunged the sheep meadow into the corn-fields, and the corn-fields into the creek; and climbing out of the creek, as if the land were hurrying to be on its way, more sheep pasture, alfalfa, barns and stiles, and so on to the Tarkington Farm, whose buildings, with the exception of silo, were hidden by trees.

In Rebekka’s and Henry’s childhood, the creek that plunged through South Meadow had wound its way through the town so that every so often, as you drove, clump-clump, went hoofs over wooden bridges. The soft thunder of the loose flooring in these bridges reverberated down into Davey’s sixth year, then the town appropriation went through for filling in the creek.

Every Schuyler had reason to remember that rear of flowing pasture and farm-land, and had plunged and shouted away many a somnolent midsummer afternoon in this tramp stream that had, in rare fashion, wandered off the flank of a two-hundred-mile river, to rattle its way over the stones. While David was growing up, practically all the streets that it had intersected were filled in, doing away with the pleasant commotion of the wooden bridges. But like a rash, immediately beyond the town, it broke out again.

The South Meadow ran on beyond the creek to the railroad. A double row of persimmon-trees marked the edge of the Old Gentleman’s property. Sometimes, on the afternoons that were mealy to the tongue of the apricot haze, David lay flat on his back under them on the coarse, yellowing pasture-grasses. Sometimes a persimmon came down and spat him in the face.[3]

Mathilda Schuyler, who sewed a great deal in a large third-story sort of attic-room, with matting on the floor, and large blobs of unused blankets, comforters, pillows, and feather beds, tied into sheets and arranged around the room, could lean out of that window and yodel to Davey when she wanted him, as she had yodeled to the small Schuylers who had scampered before.

But somehow, after the interval of more than the score of years that separated her sixth from this seventh child of hers, Mathilda had taken on some of the nervousness of a young mother with her first-born. And an additional kind of self-consciousness, as if to Davey were owing some sort of an explanation for the circumstance of a curious isolation caused by years.

And yet, after a certain square little fashion, David was the sturdiest of her children, with his father’s tight kind of sinew that knitted him down into stockiness, and short heavy legs that were to remain that way until at fourteen they shot up, lean and over-lanky. A brownish little fellow with the blackest of pupils to his eyes, surrounded by the clear gold of syrup. There were three black dots in the gold of the left eye. “Faith, Hope, and Charity,” said Emma to him one day, and kissed the eye shut.

Maybe! But David wriggled. He was pretty constantly being kissed by the three big women, his sisters. And even by his nieces and nephews. It was a favorite pleasantry of Rebekka’s eldest son, Steve, who was fifteen when David was four, to address him as Uncle David and then pick him up by the seat of his small trousers and deposit him on top of a mantelpiece.

Emma’s daughter Claire was the niece nearest his age. When she was an adorable eleven, a blond Bavarian-looking doll with her mother’s bright, plump Teutonic prettiness, and dimples everywhere, knees, wrists, elbows, cheeks and chin, her Uncle David was six. It was the period when he was all square. Square, brown, straight bangs. Square, ragged front teeth. The squareness beginning to lock his chin. The eyes of clear gold syrup with the three brown motes in the left, that looked at you squarely, under the square brow made squarer by bangs.

“He’s a Schuyler every inch,” would say his Mother, placing cold, oldish hands on his young hair.

“Except the inches that haven’t come yet,” was the Old Gentleman’s chuckle. “Don’t count your inches before they’re hatched. And there’s no telling ... he may remain a little shorty....”

“No telling,” repeated Mathilda, with the thought racing across her eyes that could make them look about to tear. “No telling for us, that won’t live to see it.”

“We’ll live!” said the Old Gentleman, expanding as if to give validity to a remark that had none whatsoever, except what grand manner could contribute. “Never mind, we’ll live, to see everything.”

“Dave, what do you want to be when you grow up?” was a constant reiteration of the Old Gentleman’s, as if to jerk the future closer, so that he might cram some of this late son’s maturity into his lifetime.

For the first ten years of his boyhood, with a consistency that never failed to raise the family-laugh, David stood by a selection that was neither precocious nor unique:

“I want to be a policeman.”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] ... they christened this late-comer brother of mine David Whittier. David, a name which Mother had stored up all through the years like a squirrel its nut, bringing it forth each time a son was born to her only to concede it in favor of family-names like Philip and Henry. Whittier was father’s choice, after his beloved Whittier County.

[2] ... I think some of his most brilliant talks are the unrecorded ones made more or less extemporaneously from the platforms of trains, or I remember once, from the hangar of a roof just as he was stepping on board a plane and a few hundred had gathered to cheer him on his way. The out-of-doors seemed to clarify even that clear brain of his.

[3] A painting of my brother, done from an enlarged snapshot taken one Sunday afternoon in South Meadow by Miss Henriette Simpson, now hangs in Americana House, Philadelphia, the gift of the Midwest Junior Historical Society.