The American: A Middle Western Legend (2 page)

So he listened to the father's tales of what was and what would be.

IV

It was not many weeks before the boy realized that the father had exchanged an old master for a new one, and that the rapaciousness of this new master, one hundred and forty acres of land, could not and would not be satisfied. If they had worked before, they worked twice as hard now, and “mortgage” became a personalized monster in the boy's mind. Instead of a pig being killed for food, it went to the market; mortgage explained that. Mortgage took the potatoes away, and they ate turnips. Mortgage made the father harder and more bitter than he had ever been. When the harness strap came down on the boy's back, it was mortgage that made it quiver with additional force.

In the old place, the boy worked only for the father, and since there was not enough work to fill all his time, and certain days when there was almost no work, he had a little time to himself always, and sometimes hours and hours to play, to wander alone, to go to school. But now he was thirteen years old, and the father said that was too old for school and too old for idleness. What the boy had done, his brothers and sisters would do; the father worked twice as hard, if such a thing were possible—to a degree where the neighbors said, “The devil has him.” And the boy was hired out to work. First on this place and then on the other. “Strong as a man,” the father said. “He can do a man's work.” So the boy went one day to the Bjornsons', and the next to the Schwabs', and the next to Joneses' place, and then maybe back to Bjornsons', or three days at one place and five at another, or half a day's work in the forenoon with three miles to walk, and then a five-mile walk to the next place in the same day, to get more work in.

He became a work-weary, dulled, and senseless animal. He fell into bed at night and woke in the morning with all his bones aching. “Growing pains,” his mother said. “He should rest a little.” But the father was like a man insane when the thought of sickness was suggested. Everything could be fought but this. Suppose he himself were to fall sick, or to break an arm or a leg, or crush a hand, the sort of accident which is never far away in heavy manual work, just suppose, just realize that would be the end of everything; the farm would go, mortgage and taxes would smash down, the wife and children would starve—then don't speak of it. “The boy has growing pains, the boy is lazy. You spare the rod and spoil the child. The boy brings home three dollars a week.”

John Peter worked. He pitched hay. He churned butter. He shoveled manure. For a thousand years, his ancestors had done such work, and those who were weak or prey to disease died; he was strong. He walked twenty miles in one day, and if it rained, he had growing pains. And inside of him, the glands matured, the heavy juices ran through his body, and there came a day when he raised a hand to stop the harness strap, a hand that held his father's wrist with power and determination, while the hate sparked out of him.

“Devil!”

“Then don't beat me,” the boy said. “Then don't beat me again. I been beat enough, I tell you.” In English this.

In German, his father said, “Speak my tongue!”

“This is mine. Don't beat me.”

“Speak my tongue!”

“This is mine!”

The wrist tore loose; the father was still stronger. Though he fought back, the father beat him. “A devil,” the father said. “A devil from hell.”

After that, the boy knew he would go away. What bonds there were had worn thin. He would go away and never come back. The world outside was a fearful place, but nothing it held could be more fearful than the wild, inhuman struggle that the father had to make for this brood to live.

V

Now he faced his father differently, and that was a part of the difference in him, of his own subjective realization of that difference. He thought of himself now as “Pete.” Pete was an American word. I am Pete, I am going away, he would think to himself, and then tell his father so.

“Where will you go?”

“I'll go, I'll go, you'll see.”

“You'll go? Well, you'll go out and starve. So you think you're a man now. Go ahead then.”

Time went by without his going, because the threat of the world was so great a threat, because the unknown was so tremendous, stretching away from the farm on every hand, with a thousand facets of suggestion and only one or two facets of actuality. But his dreams were more complex, more stirring, richer as he reached the age of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. A ferment was in the nation, and it stirred every corner, even the remotest rural corner of Ohio. The ferment was war, and the catalyst was old Abe Lincoln who had come from somewhere in these very parts. News which came to the backwash farm where Pete Altgeld lived was none too clear; no newspapers reached the farm, except, very occasionally, a German language paper, and by word of mouth the war appeared as confusing as wars have always appeared to such earthbound folk. A villain's name was Jeff Davis, and already there was a song about him, about hanging him high on a sour apple tree, and down along the river where strange people called “Abolitionists,” and they were on the side of the black men, the slaves, and that also was somehow bound into the war. On the farms where he worked Pete heard sung, “Old Union of glory, Let's die for her, boys”; and he sang the words to the fine, lilting tune, and even felt something curiously blood-stirring as he sang it; yet he had only the haziest notion of what the
Union
was, and the word
glory
meant absolutely nothing to him, so primitive and simple was his knowledge of English, a work-knowledge, a field-and-barn knowledge.

For the most part, those people for whom he worked were against the war; they had come from one place or another in the old country, and they had an ancient folk-knowledge of war, which Pete somehow shared. It was a visitation, like the plague or the pox, and though they were used in it, it never concerned them. Once, however, when Pete drove to town with Bjornson, there was a patriotic rally on the main street of Little Washington. A unit of the 33rd Ohio National Guard was preparing to march off to the war. They stood in the dusty street, fourteen of them lined up very straight, blue uniforms, red sashes, while old Meyerburg, who kept the feed store, addressed the crowd in German. Then Stacy, the justice of the peace, spoke in English, and then old Fritz Anderson, veteran of the Revolution, white-bearded and just a little drunk, told about the Battle of Bunker Hill. As the number of Revolutionary veterans narrowed, the number of battles in which the remaining had participated increased, and by now Anderson's lexicon included just about every engagement, large or small.

Peter asked Bjornson what was the Revolution, and Bjornson, on not too certain ground, said it was a war like this one, but a long time ago. A drum began to play, a long roll, a short roll, and then a rat-a-tat-tat, over and over. The National Guard began to march, and some of them picked up a tune, “Susybell was from Kentucky, a loose-limbed gal an' durn unlucky.” Pete leaped from the wagon and ran after them, Bjornson shouting, “Hey, Pete, hey, where are you going?”

Asking the soldiers, “How old you got to be? How old you got to be?” Pete kept pace with them, until Bjornson grabbed him by the shirt and said, “This I'll tell your father.”

“How old you got to be?”

The soldiers, most of them freckled farm boys, well under twenty grinned at Pete and advised him, “To hell with the old Dutchman. Come along, kid.”

And though he drove back to the farm with Bjornson, the words echoed and reechoed, “Come along, kid, come along, kid, come along, kid”; the quality of warmth which had accompanied the offhand phrase magnifying itself more and more, developing a richness like old wine, “Come along, kid,” one comrade to another, “Come along.” Nothing like that had ever been said to him before; nothing like that had ever happened before.

VI

“I'm going to war,” he told the father.

He was not given to many words; sometimes, in a week, he spoke to the father only once or twice, to the mother no more, and only a little more to his brothers and sisters.

“Yes,” the father said. “You stay here. The work—”

“I'm going to war,” Pete said. “To war. That's all. I made up my mind—I'm going.”

And seeing that he meant it, that in his words there was neither doubt nor hesitation nor indecision, the father measured his son, as for the first time and very likely the first time, measured him up and down and sidewise too, the short legs, the hard muscles, the ugly face, the brush hair, and the split lip and the son's eyes met the father's in return appraisal, telling him—No more beatings. I am a man, you hear me, a man. Then the father said:

“When you go, you go. All right. Until you go, you do your work. You work, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Pete said.

So for another year, he bided his time and worked; it did not occur to him that the war might be over, for by now war was a natural condition on the land, just as rain was and snow was. Inside his head, a dream developed, and for the first time he knew a curiosity for his country. The war was in the south, and he would ask questions concerning the south, or sing
Dixie
to himself, “Look away, look away, look away down south in Dixie,” where there was no summer, no winter, only balm and blue skies and pink pelicans. There were beautiful women, and who knew what might not happen to a soldier? The rhythm of his body was different now, and the things he had wanted once were nothing to the fires that began to consume him. It affected his work; he would pause in the middle of a job, slow down, do things wrong until complaints came back to the father:

“That boy of yours, his head is empty.”

But the father didn't beat him; it was understood that a beating would mean a struggle, and the struggle would have only one outcome. Instead, the father warned him:

“The neighbors call you a fool.”

“Then I'm a fool.”

“A halfwit, you hear me, a person with only part of his senses.”

“All right.”

“The shame is mine,” the father reminded him. “But you do your work, do you hear me?”

In English, Pete answered, “I hear you, sure.”

For a whole year Pete waited, bided his time, asked questions, gleaned information, became crafty and sly about the ways of warfare. To just go out and become a soldier was not so simple; it could be done, but it was a complicated procedure, and Pete learned that those who did it were fools. A smart man sold himself into the National Guard. Group by group, the militia were being called up as volunteers, and for every volunteer, the county paid a bonus of one hundred dollars. In this anti-war region, there was an active business done in substitutions, for a hundred dollars might be a fortune to one man, and yet to another nothing as compared with the hardships of war. Thus, when talk became current that the 48th Regiment of the National Guard was being formed, Pete hunted up a militiaman whose name had been given him. A litle talk, a signature on a piece of paper, and the deal was concluded whereby the boy became a soldier of the Republic and a hundred dollars richer all in one moment. Pete returned to his home, frightened, freed and bound at the same time, breathless with the wonder of what he had accomplished by his own will, his own forethought, his own planning, and wealthy by the hundred dollars he clutched in his hand. He returned home and told the father, “Well, I done it, I became a soldier,” and then found the old fear returning as anger flowed into his father's face, mottling it, purpling it, making the muscles bulge and the veins stand out. Fear made him thrust out his clenched hand, and the greenbacks unbent themselves like a flower blooming, blossomed and fell to the floor, like a contrived scene in a bad play. And both he and his father stared at the money until the old man said:

“Where? How?”

They were the bereaved, father and son, the world moving and changing, positions reversing, for here was more money in actual dollars than either of them had known, turning, curiously, their anger and resentment and fear into the blocked and tired emotions of the wholly frustrated. The father knew that his son would go away, and the son knew it too, although now, this moment, the father was no longer an enemy, no longer a dreadful foe, but only a work-tired, life-tired, aging peasant in a dirty shirt and dirty jeans. And the barefooted, sunburnt boy, shockhaired and ugly, was suddenly the father's son, the firstborn, the lifeblood, and the only realization of immortality a man has or can hope for. The boy bent, gathered the money, and said simply:

“Bounty.”

Then he gave it to his father, who took it, held it a moment, and counted it, counted it twice. One hundred dollars. He called the mother, who came, and then the brothers and sisters came.

“A hundred dollars,” the father said.

“A hundred dollars,” the others said.

The mother sobbed, and the father muttered, knowing that his words sold his son into bondage, “You will need money to be a soldier.”

“I need nothing,” Pete answered, speaking in his father's tongue, taking victory and admitting defeat.

“A hundred dollars,” the mother said, for her thoughts were so tumultuous that no other phrase could even approach them.

“You neéd a little money.”

“Nothing.” He was free; didn't they understand that?

“But ten dollars,” the father said, offering it, a gesture, the first such gesture in the boy's life. What matter how the money came? It was the father's now, and he was giving his son ten dollars. The boy took it.

VII

At a quartermaster's depot they were given uniforms, blankets, messkits, canteens, guns, and ammunition. Pete would see war, some day, become a different thing from this haphazard, hit-or-miss method. He would see other things too. When the blue uniforms fell to pieces after a few months' wear, he would have something to remember that eventually would work itself into a part of a great pattern, as when a gun blew up in a soldier's face, or a canteen poisoned the water, or leather shoes turned into paper and woolen blankets into shoddy. But now it was all wonderful, and by virtue of the sovereign State of Ohio, he was garbed as never before. It was true that the uniform was several sizes too large, and it was also true that on the first day the guns were issued, one of them went off and blew a tall, slow-spoken, and good-natured young volunteer out of this world, but those were minor incidents in the first romance he had ever known. How could it compare with the major fact that for once in his life he was treated as a man among men, sharing their doubts and uncertainties, sharing their surprises and excitements, not so ugly as he had been considered once; for in this amazing variety of the short, the tall, the thin, the fat, the gainly, and the ungainly, his own ugliness was a smaller factor than it had ever been before. He rode on a train for the first time in his life, but so did half the regiment for the first time in their lives. For the first time in his memory he was out of the State of Ohio, but that was also the case with most of the regiment, excepting the few hard-bitten veterans, non-commissioned officers mostly, contemptuous of these green recruits, warning them this was not war, this frolic from the supply depot to the training center; but what use was it for a veteran to describe a rebel when they knew so well that Johnny Reb was a dirty, yellow, slinking coward who would run away the first time a shot was fired? Anyway, the war was almost over; they would add the finishing touch and they would do it gloriously. No one could tell them different. So they swaggered on the train and boasted and chewed tobacco, many of them for the first time, and got sick, and threw out their chests proudly at local stations where crowds turned out to receive them, until the veterans could only say, “Hayseeds, hayseeds, Jesus God Almighty, what stinking lousy hayseeds.” But they only grew more proud of themselves, roaring, “We are coming, Father Abraham—” and Pete added his voice to theirs.