The American: A Middle Western Legend (4 page)

“School,” the father said, not as he would have said it once, but trying to grasp the word, feel it, relate it. “School is for the rich, for the Duke's son or the son of the merchant—” In his own tongue, he fell into references from the old country, and his German took on a whining, bitter accent. “School is not for a worker, not for a farmer, not for us. Were you born with silk stockings, or did you get these damned notions from your companions at war? Are you a worthless loafer now that the army has sent you back to take the bread from the ground once more, the way our kind should?”

“Maybe I am, I don't know,” Pete said.

“Then go back to work.”

He knew there was no use talking about it, no use arguing it. Pick up and go off, yet he was old enough to know that the world isn't a mother to men. He had strength to sell for food and drink, yet he had never sold it as a free agent, without even a burrow to crawl back to. When he left the farm this time, there would be no returning. His mother begged him, “We are old folks, your father means no harm. So stay here.” When they pressed him, he felt an anger that was unlike anything else; he burst out. He left without even saying goodby.

XII

Though the school was free, it took away his working time. Hours he could have sold at wages had to be put into study, and still he had to have a place to sleep and something to eat. With two other boys, he found a miserable little room over the Mansfield tannery. It stank like a chemical vat; it was hot in the summer, cold in the winter. There were no beds; they slept on the floor, sharing a few old horse blankets.

They ate what they could get when they could get it, scraps from the butcher, cooked meal, stale bread. If Pete earned three dollars a week, he could live, but three dollars was a goal, not a regular achievement. School was work too; he didn't learn quickly; it took him ten hours a day to keep up with the normal progress of a boy three years younger than he. He was big and ungainly and a dolt, a man back from war sitting in a schoolhouse, and not bright; he heard that expression used about him many times, not bright. A sense of himself returned; here was not the struggle of an army in the field; they looked at him, and again he realized fully his ugliness, his harelip, robbing himself of any assurance he might have had. Even the two boys he lived with didn't trust him; they would talk in whispers, apart from him, and sometimes they would stare at him as if they had never seen him before. He had to hack his way through the basic mysteries of multiplication, subtraction, division, and if he dared to ask a question, he would find the whole class laughing at him. The teacher asked him once:

“Are you sure this is the place for you, John?”

Inwardly, he cursed and fumed at the sleepy, smug Ohio town. “Get out again,” he told himself. There was something wrong, something woefully wrong about the inside and the outside of himself; he put it to himself that way. Inside him, nothing was impossible; he was sure few people dreamed his dreams; inside, he was glib, assured; he made speeches mentally and talked fluently and intelligently. He read a story about Thomas Jefferson and thereafter devoured everything that he could lay hands on which in any way concerned the man, but when he tried to translate his wonderful discovery of democracy into speech in the classroom, the words came forth distorted and wrongly accented, and his thoughts crumpled in a maze of laughter.

And with that, he had to keep himself alive. He had to earn at least three dollars a week. He loaded carts, ran errands, cleaned outhouses, forced himself awake in the middle of the night to help clean out the tannery. But that made for only a few pennies here and there. “Bad times,” they told him, and paid him five cents for an hour's work. Once, when he hadn't eaten for three days, his mother came in from the farm with a basket of food, and though he ate it and would eat it again, he resented her, offered her no word of thanks.

He came to understand what he wanted. He wanted to be a teacher. He wanted to stop being a work-beast and live in that other life he saw all around him, where people wore decent clothes and ate enough and seemed so happy, where small children had more learning than he did. A teacher was paid over twenty dollars a month, and a teacher didn't have to work the way he did. A teacher walked down the street and he had the respect of the community. Well, it was better to know what he wanted to do; the weariness had a purpose, and there was a certain insanity now in his driving toward an end. In a fashion, he became happier than he had ever been; he was creating for himself a code and a philosophy of opportunity and advancement by hard work. He would show them that he could work harder than the next man.

A year passed, and he was still alive; he had lost some weight and been sick twice, but he was alive, and he had schooling. He walked to Lexington and called on a Mr. Gailey, who ran a school for the instruction of the teaching profession. He was not a desirable contact for Mr. Gailey; he was not well dressed; but he talked for three hours about why he must be a teacher, why Mr. Gailey must give him a chance, and how he would pay back every penny of it afterward, even if it took him all his life. He sat crouched over, talking and pleading and even threatening, a fire in his eyes that suggested to the instructor that this farm boy was not quite sane; but there was a real need for teachers, and an even greater need for some who could speak both German and English. Gailey agreed to give him a chance.

XIII

So there are no gates closed to a man with talent; he had always known what was inside of him, and at nineteen he was a teacher at a salary of thirty-five dollars a month. The people round and about said, “You wouldn't have thought it about Altgeld's boy, but it just goes to show that you can't judge a man by how he looks.” He bought a black broadcloth suit out of his first month's pay, he cut his hair short, and a mustache was beginning to cover his split lip. He affected a thin cane, the hallmark of a teacher, and when he performed his first thrashing, he kept telling himself, “Hard work and guts. What did I come from—nothing. So a beating doesn't hurt.” When he walked down the streets of Woodville, people said hello to him, and whenever he entered the Woodville School, his first appointment, he had a fine, proud feeling of identification. The students disliked him, but that was a matter of course with every teacher, and if he had any doubts about the rigid mechanics of what he taught, he never allowed them to trouble him greatly. Education was like a god; he read many books, and each time he finished one, he felt like a man who has come from profound worship. He was invited to tea by the Misses Carteret, the maiden sisters who were one of the town's best families and the bulwark of culture in Woodville, and though for a while he was made speechless by the sumptuous beauty of their home, the overstuffed pieces, the ornate horsehair sofa, the lifelike pheasant under a wonderfully wrought glass bell which had a china figure of a hunter perched on top of it, the delicate lace antimacassars, the Oriental carpet, the crystal closet, and the many painted lamps, he was nevertheless able to relax after a while and even agree with them that Whitman was a rude barbarian, although he had actually never heard of Whitman, and hardly knew whether he was a general or a local politician. But he had read Lamb's
Tales from Shakespeare
and was able to make a credible pretense at knowing the plays, and agreed that the theatre, while ungodly, could make a contribution to a select few; and he found, in telling some of his experiences from the great war, that he could also be amusing, for both the sisters and the Methodist minister laughed with real appreciation. But the fires inside him were not quenched by warm tea; as much as he had, still he wanted and lusted. He, who had once regarded a girl as the unobtainable, now played suit to a pretty little teacher at the school, and, rebuffed, thought that he could only die. He couldn't put out the fire inside himself; the daughter of Charles Adams, who ran the wagon works, was still unobtainable; he dreamed of her and set himself new lands to conquer.

The father and the mother came to him again, now. They plucked at umbilical cords, and when he attempted to be superior and disdainful, the mother broke down and wept, and the father stared embarrassedly at the ground. They were peasant folk and their son was a gentleman of quality, but they were going to lose the farm unless they could lay hands on a little money; they were still in the jungle where a man attempts to crawl uphill on hands and knees, and he was making thirty-five dollars a month. “All right, all right,” he said. “Whatever you want, I will give it to you.” They kissed his hand; they had never dreamed that they would father and mother such a son, and it was not their fault. “All right, all right,” he said.

Everyone said that now Pete Altgeld would settle down, because the boy had quality and drive and perseverance, as you could see. If one girl had rebuffed him, another went walking with him one evening, down to the edge of town, past the lumber yard, and along the winding cowpath, talking quickly and vapidly, and it was all so easy; but fear followed on that, and like a caged animal his mind lurched from side to side, and when he was once again invited to the sisters Carteret, there was a musty smell of decay he had not noticed before. Anton Schwab, the town drunkard and athiest, cornered him one day as he returned from the schoolhouse and said, “How is the paragon of virtue?”

He wanted to get away; it did no one any good to be seen talking to Schwab, and certainly not a schoolmaster, but the atheist held onto both his lapels, “Now listen to me, Altgeld, because in a little while your blood's going to stop running, like the blood of everyone else in this place. You got a soul, you understand me? I can say that because I don't believe in their Methodist-Baptist-Lutheran God, and anyway in a place where there are only two or three souls, stretching a point, you can spot them, believe me. But you won't have a soul soon; soon you'll have just a little hard rock under your shirt and, believe me, I know the signs. I used to say, Pete Altgeld, he's a man—tell them all to go dirty their own damned outhouses. No—you're changing. Maybe you ain't got a soul. Bigots, dirty, lousy bigots. What do you teach in that school of yours? I'll tell you—lies, lies. Two and two make four, the ultimate truth? Lies. And you're becoming a lie yourself, a dirty little leering lie. Get away, get away before it's too late. I know. I know how quick it's too late.”

He was afraid afterward that someone had seen the drunkard talking to him. It gave him new confidence to see the moral wreck that Schwab was, unshaven, unclean, reeking of liquor. And Schwab was an educated man, a man who had had every possible opportunity. What did Schwab mean—give up a job for thirty-five dollars a month? No, he had worked too hard for this, too hard. Others had childhoods; he had none; it was used up and thrown away, but at least now he had something. He tried to make a refrain of that, now he had something, now he had something. But as days passed, weeks and months, the props fell away, so gradually that he never noticed, but fell away and left him as he had been before, bound in, bound tight, hand, foot, and breast. The bonds were different, he began to see. This wasn't the castle he had planned for himself; he was going to conquer the world, and he had conquered the Ladies' Poetry Society. Even the workingmen, standing each noon in front of Meyer's saloon with their big cans of suds, seemed to be laughing at him. And he was expected to marry. He was twenty years old, and there were three available girls in town whom it was right and proper for him to marry. For all his pay, he had not enough money left, with what the farm took now, to support a wife, so he would take her back to the father and the farm.

Again and again, he asked himself, why am I different? Am I sick, rotten, cast out? He saw holes where others saw things solid. These fine and upright citizens, why didn't he worship them properly? What did he want?

When he left, he knew that he was running away. He left without cause or reason, and a hundred different explanations were brought forth by his family and the townsfolk. They talked about him for a time, and then they forgot him. In any case, even at his best, he had troubled them in some fashion they could not comprehend, nor did the town drunkard help by voicing around the opinion that Pete Altgeld had gone off to save his soul.

XIV

But he wasn't troubled with his soul; he was like a man on a spree, and he stopped thinking. Enough of thinking, he told himself. For five years he had studied and thought. He had arrayed himself in a black suit and a cane. He broke the cane into little pieces now. As he walked along the road to Cincinnati, he carried his black coat over his arm, but it was hot and the coat was heavy, and finally he threw it into the roadside ditch. His black string tie followed the coat. He rolled up his sleeves and bared his veined, muscular arms. A teacher! He knew nothing, he knew less than nothing! It was a trap, everything a trap, back to the farm, the father. Three girls eligible, take your choice. He spat in the dust, shouted, leaped up and down, and slapped his thighs.

You had to know how, and if you were wise, you learned. He, Pete Altgeld, was wise. Look how nearly he was trapped; well, he would never be trapped again. Squeeze fortune, he thought; put its neck between your hands and squeeze until it screamed mercy. But give no mercy, give no edge. The town drunkard was a fool too. Who in hell was he to preach sermons? And that was all he did, preach sermons, even if he had no God to tie his sermons onto. Pete Altgeld had more sense than that, more sense.

He vaulted a fence and collected ripe apples. He bathed his hot feet in a placid brook. At night, he curled up in a haystack, and watched the shooting stars. You had to watch sharp for them, sharp and quick and then they arched like a rocket. He listened to the night-sounds, the call of the owl, the croaking of frogs, the bassoon grunt of cows. If he was a tramp, all right then, he was a tramp; he wasn't the only one. The roads were full of old soldiers. Sometimes he walked with them; sometimes he sat around a fire with them, toasting a can of stew, and listening to them swap tales. And then Cincinnati. In Cincinnati he found work, a week in a corncob factory, and then—telling them to go to the devil and be damned—another week on the loading platforms by the railroad; but no bonds, no chains, no shackles. He was a free agent, and when he put his teeth into something it would be the right thing. He thought, if there was a war again, he'd enlist; but there was no war. Then the road. He saw the men in the factories, and for him, that was as certain as any slavery. He saw an abortive strike in Cincinnati; they were fools if they thought it would get them anywhere, he told himself. Stay away from chains in the beginning. Keep to the road, that's the way. Work when you have to eat. And reading—well, he had read only one thing since he left Woodville, a thin volume of Thoreau which another tramp had given him. That was good, but he had a deep-seated suspicion of books. Stay on the road, with the sun in the daytime and the stars at night. That was the way.