Chapter 23

Someone proposed races up and down the cornfield. We rolled up our trousers, to make it more hilarious, and ran, smashing through the tender spring growth ... yelling and shouting....

Then the game unaccountably shifted into seeing who could pull up the most corn stalks, beginning at an equal marked-off space out in each row and rushing back with torn-up handfuls....

The afternoon dropped toward twilight and everybody was as mellow as the departing day--which went down in a riot of gold....

A great area of the field looked as if it had fallen in the track of a victorious army, or had been fallen upon by a cloud of locusts.

A chill came in with twilight, and we built a fire, and danced about it.

I danced and danced ... we all danced and howled in Indian disharmony ... wailing ... screeching ... falling ... getting up again ... when I danced and leaped the world resumed its order ... when I stood still or sat down plump, the trees took up the gyrations where I had left off, and went about in solemn, ringing circles ... green and graceful minuets of nature....

"Here's to good old Gregory, drink 'er down, drink 'er down!" I heard the boys, led by Jack Travers, bray discordantly.

"Want 'a hear some songs?" I quavered, interrogating.

"What kind o' songs?" asked a big, hulking boy that we called 'Black Jim,' because of his dark complexion.

"Real songs," I replied, "jail songs, tramp songs, coacaine songs!"

All those Rabelaisan folk-things I had lost while hopping the freight, came surging back, each not in fragments, but entire. Drunk, I did then what my brain since, intoxicated or sober, cannot do ... I rendered them all, one after the other, just as I had copied them down....

* * * * *

"And more! Gregory, more!" the boys kept shouting.

I sat down and began to cry because I had lost the script. It had all gone out of my head again as quickly as it had come, so that I could not even repeat one they'd asked for.

"Hell, he's got a crying drunk the first thing!"

"Cheer up, old scout ... here's another cupful."

"No ... I don't want any more ... I'm never going to drink again."

And I knocked the cup out of Travers' hand with a violent drunken sweep of negation.

"No use getting huffy about it," someone put in belligerently.

"If anybody wants to fight," it was Black Jim, huge and menacing and morose, advancing....

Fight! knives! jails!...

Ah, yes, I was still in jail ... and Bud and the burly cotton thief were at it....

I staggered to my feet.

"Wait a minute, Bud ... I'm coming." I gave a run toward a barrel, sent it a violent kick, a succession of kicks....

"Wait a minute! I'm coming!"

"So am I!" grinned Black Jim belligerently, thinking I meant him and advancing slowly and surely.

The barrel burst asunder, the beer sumped and gurgled about my ankles as I stooped and picked up a stave.

"The damn fool's ruined a whole keg."

I was going to lick everybody in the jail, if I must.

"Put that stave down Gregory! put it down, for Christ's sake!"

"Good God! Grab Jim, someone!"

"Don't be a fool ... hold Gregory ... he's got the stave!"

"He'll kill Jim!"

"Or Jim'll kill him!"...

Then came a shout from nearby.

"I'll heve the law on ye, I will! destroyin' a man's cornfield like a lot o' heathens!"

Yelling and menacing, the farmer and his big, raw-boned son were upon us. They evidently thought that we were all in such a drunken condition that they could kick us about as they choose. They had just driven home from market-day in Laurel.

Everything was mixed up in my head ... but one thing out-stood: I must do my duty by my barrel stave ... as the farmer leaped into the circle he did not notice me staggering on the outskirts. I rushed up and let him have the barrel stave full across the head.

At the same time Black Jim had turned his attention to the rangy boy, felling him at a blow. The boy leaped to his feet and ran away to a safe distance.

"Paw!" he called out, 'I'll run back to th' house an' 'phone th' p'lice."

"Come on, boys, we'd better dig out!"

* * * * *

We straggled along in silent, rolling clusters, like bees smoked out, down the road ... we heard the rumble of a waggon ... when we recognised that it was our teetotaler coming back for us....

"God, if my old man hears of this I'm done for at Laurel."

"So'm I!"

"If we only lay low and don't go spouting off about it, things will be all O.K."

"We'll send Travers back with a little collection, to fix it up with the farmer, and blarney him out of taking any action."

* * * * *

In the morning I had a roaring headache ... as long as I lay quiet there was only the slow, deep regular pulse of pain driving through my head, but when I made an effort to get up, my eyeballs throbbed with such torment that they seemed to be starting out of my head....

I fell asleep in the broad day again, waking to find Jack Travers standing by my bed, pale and cynical, dusting off the ashes from the end of his eternal cigarette.

"How are you feeling this morning?"

"Rotten," I answered. I sat up and triphammers of pain renewed their pounding inside my racked head.

--"thought you would, so's soon as I got up, I came down to see you."

--"lot of good that'll do."

He whipped a flask out of his hip pocket. "Take a nip of this and it will set you right in a jiffy."

"No, I'll never drink another drop."

"Don't be a fool. Just a swallow and you'll be on your feet again."

I took a big swallow and it braced me up instantly.

"Now, come on with me, Johnnie, I'm taking you in tow for to-day! A fellow who's not used to getting drunk always mopes around after a good time like we had.... I'm seeing you through _the day after_ ... you're going to lunch with me at the frat-house and this afternoon there's a sacred concert on in Aeolian Hall that I have two tickets for."

"I'll never drink another drop as long as I live."

"That's what they all say."

* * * * *

At the Sig Kappas I met Black Jim, the first one, at the door. He shook hands shyly, laughingly.

"You sure fetched that rube a wallop ... he let one croak out of him and flopped flat ... it would have made a good comic picture."

"Lunch is ready, boys!"

I was made into a sort of hero--"a real, honest-to-God guy."

"You'll have to come to some of our frat jamborees ... Jack'll bring you up."

"We and the Sigma Deltas are Southern fraternities ... we have a hell of a sight more fun than the others ... there's the Sigma Pis--though they have some live birds, they're mostly dead ... and the Phi Nus put on too much side ... the Beta Omicrons are right there with the goods, though."

"I see."

A little freshman made an off-colour remark.

"You'd better go and see Jennie!" advised a genial young senior, who, for all his youth, was entirely bald.

"Jennie, who's Jennie?" I asked, curious.

"Our frat woman!" answered Travers casually.

"Frat woman?" I was groping for further information, puzzled.

"Yes, often a fraternity keeps a woman for the use of its members ... when a kid comes to us so innocent he's annoying, we turn him over to Jennie to be made a man of."

"This innocence-stuff is over-rated. It's better to send a kid to a nice, clean girl that we club in together and keep, and let him learn what life is, once and for all, than to have him going off somewhere and getting something, or, even worse, horning around and jeopardizing decent girls, as he's bound to otherwise."

* * * * *

There were signs of failure at the Farmers' Restaurant. The curious farmer-family that ran it were giving it up and moving back into the country again. I was soon to have no place to board, where I could obtain credit.

But it was summer by now, and I didn't care. I meditated working in the wheat harvest.

* * * * *

The editors of the _National Magazine_ had given a new impulsion to my song--and a damned bad one. Already they had accepted and printed several of my effusions.

I was to sing for them the life of present-day America, the dignity of labour, the worth of the daily, obscure endeavour of the world around me.....

In other words, instead of flattering one man of influence and power with a dedication, as was done by the poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I was to install Demos as my patron, must warp the very tissue of my thought to inform the ordinary man that the very fact that he wore overalls, acquired callouses on his hands, and was ignorant and contemptuous of culture--somehow made him a demigod! I was continually to glorify the stupidity of the people, and always append a moral.

For a time I even succeeded in working myself up into a lathering frenzy of belief in what I was doing.

* * * * *

The bedrock of life in the Middle West is the wheat harvest.

There was a man named Carl Bonton who owned a threshing machine. I heard he was in need of hands for the season.

I nailed my few books up in a drygoods box and left them in care of Professor Langworth's housekeeper, the former having gone away to Colorado for the summer. As for clothes, tramp-life had taught me the superfluity of more than a change of shirts and b.v.d's.

Bonton looked me over.

"You don't look strong enough ... the work is mighty hard."

"I'm pretty wiry. Try me out, that is all I ask. If I buckle in, I won't mind walking back to town."

Bonton's buckboard carried us the matter of five miles to where his machine, separator and cook-shack stood ... lurking behind a grove of Osage orange trees.

Bonton had brought two other men besides me, as accessories to his gang. We found the gang just tumbling forth from the cook waggon, a small, oblong sort of house on wheels ... a long table in it, with benches ... much like the lunch waggons seen standing about the streets in cities.

"Hello, boys, is it dry enough to begin loadin' yet?"

"Naw; the dew's still as heavy as rain on the bundles."

"We'd best wait a little longer, then."

* * * * *

Though it seemed that half the day had wheeled by already, by seven o'clock we rode a-field, and the less experienced of us were hard at it, tossing up bundles to the loaders, who placed them swiftly here and there till the waggons were packed tight and piled high.

I pitched up bundles from below, to an old man of sixty, who wore a fringe of grey beard, like a Mennonite.

"I don't see why Bonton ever hired you," he remarked unsympathetically, peering over the top at me from his high-piled load. Several times I had missed the top and the bundle of wheat had tumbled back to me again....

"I can't be reaching out all the time to catch your forkfuls."

"Just give me time till I learn the hang of it."

I was better with the next load. The waggons came and went one after the other ... there was a light space of rest between waggons. It was like the rest between the rounds of a prizefight.

From the cloudless sky the sun's heat poured down in floods. A monotonous locust was chirr-chirr-chirring from a nearby cottonwood ... and in the long hedge of Osage oranges moaned wood doves....

By noon I had achieved a mechanical swing that helped relieve the physical strain, a swinging rhythm of the hips and back muscles which took the burden off my aching and weaker arms.

That afternoon, late, when the old man drove his waggon up to me for the hundredth time it seemed, he smiled quizzically.

"Well, here you are still, but you're too skinny to stand it another day ... better draw your two bucks from the boss and strike out for Laurel again."

--"that so, Daddy!" and I caught three bundles at once on the tines of my fork and flung them clear to the top, and over. They caught the old man in the midriff.... I heard a sliding about and swearing ... the next moment he was in a heap, on the ground ... on the other side of the waggon.

"What th' hell did ye do that for?"

I looked innocent. "Do what?"

--"soak me in the guts with three bundles to onct an' knock me off'n the top of the load?"

"Ever since morning you've been kidding me and telling me I went too slow for you.... I thought I'd speed up a bit."

After surveying me scornfully for a minute, he mutely reascended the load, and we finished the job in silence together....

We laboured on after sunset till the full moon swung over the tree-tops.

* * * * *

Usually they did not use the cook-shack much ... it was used while on the road from one wheat farm to another. Usually the farmers' wives and daughters in the valleys and on the hillsides vied with each other as to heaping food before the threshers ... every morning saw mountains of pancakes ... bacon ... eggs ... ham ... beefsteak ... we laboured like giants, ate like hogs, slept like senseless stocks.

I climbed to my bed in the haymow that first night. It was chill enough for the use of my blanket.

I drowsed off, to wake with a jump of all my body from a dream that a giant was pressing down on me, that he had my legs doubled up over me and was breaking them into my breast....

The cramps....

I stood up and rubbed my legs till the taut tendons softened and stretched ... but when I dared bend them the littlest, the tautening and drawing twisted them again. And so I suffered half the night through, till, in wrathful agony, I stumbled to the watering trough and stood naked-white in the flood of the full moon, rubbing the icy water over my body....

The dutiful house dogs ... barking furiously, the two of them rushed at my apparition as I stood up in the trough and splashed. They embayed me as a quarry. I jumped out of the trough and threw stones at them. They backed from my attack and bit at the stones. I stepped back in the water and rubbed myself more. The dogs squatted on their haunches at a safe distance and bayed lugubriously at me and the moon in common.

The rest of the night I lay preternaturally awake, hearing the snoring and murmuring of my fellows in the mow ... hearing the horses as they crunched and whickered ... all the noises of the outside night came in at the open door of the mow. Even the hay began to annoy me as it continually rustled in my ear.

I took my blanket and went to lie on the hard ground, under the water waggon. There I heard the multitudinous insects of the night, and the whippoorwill.

Ordinarily I do not have an appetite for breakfast. That morning I thought I would eat little, but I ended by devouring six eggs, two dozen pancakes, drinking three cups of coffee ... all of which immediately lay like a lump of rock in me....

No, I could not keep it up! It was too much of an effort, such frightful labour, for sixteen hours of the day. But I thought of the old man who had jeered at me, and I trudged a-field with the rest, my fork slung over my shoulder ... sore ... I ached in every muscle ... muscles I never knew existed before talked to me with their little voices of complaint.

But after the first load I began to be better....

And by noon I was singing and whistling irrepressibly.

"You'll do ... but you'll have to put a hat on or you'll drop with sun-stroke," Bonton remarked.

"I never wear a hat."

"All right. It's your funeral, not mine," and the boss walked away.

* * * * *

"Have a nip and fortify yourself against the sun ... that's the way to do," suggested the old driver. He proffered his whiskey flask.

"Nope ... I've plenty of water to drink."

The water boy kept trailing about with his brown jug. I tipped it up to my mouth and drank and drank ... I drank and drank and worked and worked and sweated and sweated ... the top of my head perspired so that it felt cool in the highest welter of heat.

In the hot early afternoon I saw the old man lying under a tree.

"What's the matter?"

--"too hot!"

"Where's your whiskey now?"

--"'tain't the whiskey. _That_ keeps a fellow up ... it's because I'm old, not young, like you," he contested stubbornly.

* * * * *

These men that I worked with were unimaginably ignorant. One night we held a heated argument as to whether the stars were other worlds and suns, or merely lights set in the sky to light the world of men by ... which latter, the old man maintained, was the truth, solemnly asserting that the Bible said so, and that all other belief was infidelity and blasphemy. So it was that, each evening, despite the herculean labour of the day, we drew together and debated on every imaginable subject....

* * * * *

On the third day of my employment by him, Bonton put me at the mouth of the separator, where the canvas ran rapidly in, carrying the bundles down into the maw of the machine. My job was feeding the bundles to it ... up in the air in the back the threshed straw was kicked high, and the chaff whirled in dusty clouds ... from a spout in the side of the separator the threshed grain poured in an unending stream....

* * * * *

It was difficult to keep the horses from the straw stacks that the daily threshing built up.

Also Bonton speeded so terrifically that much of the grain was shot out into the straw....

One night three of the horses made their way to the straw and ate and gorged ... in the morning one of them was dead and the other two were foundered....

* * * * *

The cramps bothered me no more.

The boss came up to me and slapped me on the back.

"--thought you'd sag under," but, putting his hand on my back, "you've got powerful back muscles, though your arms and legs are like beanpoles ... a fellow never can tell about a man, till he's tried out."

* * * * *

After nearly a month of the work, Bonton began acting glum toward me....

"Gregory, I'm going to pay you off to-day!"

"--pay me off to-day?"

"Yes."

"What's the matter? ain't I working hard enough?"

"I've no fault to find with your work ... you're a better worker than most of the men ... in fact they complain that you set too hard a pace at the separator....

"But you argue too much ... keep the men up o' nights debating about things they never even considered before. And it upsets them so, what with the arguing and the sleep they lose, that they ain't up to the notch, next day.

"No, that's the only fault I have to find in you," he continued, as he counted out sixty dollars into my hand ... "but," and he walked with me, disquieted to the road, "but if you'll wait around till this afternoon, I'll drive you back to town."

"No. It's not over ten miles. I'll walk."

I was glad to be paid off. I was missing my books and my leisure, longing for the cool alcoves of books in the university "stack."

"You understand me, I hope ... business is business and work is work. I've found it doesn't do to argue ... only stirs up trouble....

"I hope you don't think all this debating will end after you're gone?... Oh, no,--for the next week or so the boys will continue shooting their mouths off ... the Baptist will fight the Methodist, and both will join against the Seventh Day Adventist ... and the one Catholic will be assailed by all hands....

"Before you came, no one knew what the other fellow believed, and no one cared ... but now you've started something."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Bonton."

"It can't be helped now ... don't fail to let me know in what magazines your poems on threshing and the harvest will appear."

* * * * *

I trudged townward, light-hearted ... a poem began to come to me before I had gone a mile ... at intervals I sat down and wrote a few lines....

That fall the _National Magazine_ printed _The Threshers_ and _The Harvest_ and _The Cook-Shack_, three poems, the fruit of that work. All three written on the road as I walked back to town ... and all three didactic and ridiculous in their praise of the worker.

* * * * *

Frank Randall, tinsmith and plumber, who ran his shop on the main street, rented me a back room over his store, for two dollars a week. It had been occupied by big Sam, the negro shoemaker, and it was neither in order, nor did it smell very sweet. But I cleaned and aired it, and sprinkled disinfectant about that I had bought at the drug store.

Then I fetched my books down from Langworth's in a wheelbarrow, and I set them up in several neat rows.

I lay back on my cot and looked at them in satisfaction and happiness. I had enough for food and lodging for nearly three months, if I cooked for myself. Two dollars a week for food and two for rent, and I'd do my own washing ... say five a week at the most! that would mean twelve weeks of doing nothing but reading and writing and studying.

The first day of my sojourn over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness, such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression.

I opened the _Buch der Lieder_ at the poem in his preface--the song of the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his soul with kisses. And the nightingale was singing....

"O, shöne Sphinx, O löse mir Das Rätsel, das wunderbare! Ich hab' darüber nachgedacht Schon manche tausand Yahre."

* * * * *

Monday morning ... by six or seven o'clock a rustling below, in the shop, by eight, the day's work in full blast ... a terrific pounding and hammering on sheets of tin and pieces of pipe. The uproar threw my mind off my poetry.

I went down to speak with Randall about it....

"Frank, I can't stand this, I must leave."

"Nonsense; stay; you'll get used to it."

"No, I must go if the noise keeps up continually like this."

"Well, it won't ... we have a special job to finish ... tin-roofing ... but if you want a place to stay where it is quiet, I have a camp, not far out, on the Ossawatomie, where I go for week-ends...."

"Where is it? That would be fine. I'd like to stay there."

"You know where old Farmer Brown lives, by the abandoned church, just outside of Perthville?"

"Yes. That's seven miles out on the Osageville road."

"Take the first turn to the right from his house, going west. It's an unused bye-road and it runs plumb into my cabin. There's a frying pan there ... and some flour ... and bacon ... tell you what ... it's been broken into several times. I'll consider it worth while if you go and live there, and I get no rent from you for it nor the room upstairs ... you'll be alone, God knows--excepting Saturdays and Sundays."

* * * * *

I packed my Heine in a bundle ... with my Bible and my Josephus in the Greek, along with Whiston's English version ... and I included a bundle of books on New Testament times that made me groan under their weight. For I planned to begin a four-act play on Judas, and must study for writing that, as well as learn the "how" of the lyric....

The stupendousness of the silence of absolute solitude! At first the thoughts run on with a tangle and jangle, a turmoil almost of madness ... then they quiet down into the peace that only a hermitage gives and the objects of life are seen in their true relativity and perspective.

My diet was one of sow-belly, bread, and coffee, and what fish I caught in the sluggish, muddy stream....

Saturday, toward sunset, I heard a whooping in the woods. It was Randall coming with a few friends for his week-end, as he had warned. With him, his wild brother, Jack; and Bill, his assistant plumber and man-about-shop.

The drinking had begun before they were in sight of the shack. And it was kept up till late Sunday night ... around a big fire in a cleared space they sang and gambled and drank.