Years of My Youth. Howells William Dean
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but they chopped so easily.
They grew abundantly on the island which formed another feature of our oddly distributed property. This island was by far its most fascinating feature, and for us boys it had the charm and mystery which have in every land and age endeared islands to the heart of man. It was not naturally an island, but had been made so by the mill-races bringing the water from the dam, and emptying into the river again below the mills. It was flat, and half under water in every spring freshet, but it had precious areas grown up to tall ironweeds, which, withering and hardening in the frost, supplied us with the darts for our Indian fights. The island was always our battle-ground, and it resounded in the long afternoons with the war-cries of the encountering tribes. We had a book in those days called Western Adventure, which was made up of tales of pioneer and frontier life, and we were constantly reading ourselves back into that life. This book, and Howe’s Collections for the History of Ohio, were full of stories of the backwoodsmen and warriors who had made our state a battle-ground for nearly fifty years, and our life in the log cabin gave new zest to the tales of “Simon Kenton, the Pioneer,” and “Simon Girty, the Renegade”; of the captivity of Crawford, and his death at the stake; of the massacre of the Moravian Indians at Gnadenhütten; of the defeat of St. Clair and the victory of Wayne; of a hundred other wild and bloody incidents of our annals. We read of them at night till we were afraid to go up the ladder to the ambuscade of savages in our loft, but we fought them over by day with undaunted spirit. With our native romance I sometimes mingled from my own reading a strain of Old World poetry, and “Hamet el Zegri” and the “Unknown Spanish Knight,” encountered in the Vega before Granada on our island, while Adam Poe and the Indian chief Bigfoot were taking breath from their deadly struggle in the waters of the Ohio.
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When the spring opened we broke up the sod on a more fertile part of the island, and planted a garden there beside our field of corn. We planted long rows of sweet-potatoes, and a splendid profusion of melons, which duly came up with their empty seed-shells fitted like helmets over their heads, and were mostly laid low the next day by the cutworms which swarmed in the upturned sod. But the sweet-potatoes had better luck. Better luck I did not think it then; their rows seemed interminable to a boy set to clear them of purslane with his hoe; though I do not now imagine they were necessarily a day’s journey in length. Neither could the corn-field beside them have been very vast; but again reluctant boyhood has a different scale for the measurement of such things, and perhaps if I were now set to hill it up I might think differently about its size.
I dare say it was not well cared for, but an inexhaustible wealth of ears came into the milk just at the right moment for our enjoyment. We had then begun to build our new house, and for this we were now kiln-drying the green oak flooring-boards. We had built a long skeleton hut, and had set the boards upright all around it and roofed it with them, and in the middle of it we had set a huge old cast-iron stove, in which we kept a roaring fire. The fire had to be watched night and day, and it often took all the boys of the neighborhood to watch it, and to turn the boards. It must have been cruelly hot in that kiln; but I remember nothing of that; I remember only the luxury of the green corn, spitted on the points of long sticks and roasted in the red-hot stove; we must almost have roasted our own heads at the same time. But I suppose that if the heat within the kiln or without ever became intolerable, we escaped from it and from our light summer clothing, reduced to a Greek simplicity, in a delicious plunge in the river. We had our choice of the shallows, where the long ripple was warmed through and through by the sun in which it sparkled, or the swimming-hole, whose depths were almost as tepid, but were here and there interwoven with mysterious cool under-currents.
We believed that there were snapping-turtles and water-snakes in our swimming-holes, though we never saw any. There were some fish in the river, chiefly suckers and catfish in the spring, when the water was high and turbid, and in summer the bream that we call sunfish in the West, and there was a superstition, never verified by us, of bass. We did not care much for fishing, though of course that had its turn in the pleasures of our rolling year. There were crawfish, both hard-shell and soft, to be had at small risk, and mussels in plenty. Their shells furnished us the material for many rings zealously begun and never finished; we did not see why they did not produce pearls; but perhaps they were all eaten up, before the pearl disease could attack them, by the muskrats, before whose holes their shells were heaped.
Of skating on the river I think we had none. The winter often passed in our latitude without making ice enough for that sport, and there could not have been much sledding, either. We read, enviously enough, in Peter Parley’s First Book of History, of the coasting on Boston Common, and we made some weak-kneed sleds (whose imbecile runners flattened helplessly under them) when the light snows began to come; but we never had any real coasting, as our elders never had any real sleighing in the jumpers they made by splitting a hickory sapling for runners, and mounting any sort of rude box upon them. They might have used sleighs in the mud, however; that was a foot deep on most of the roads, and lasted all winter. For a little while some of us went two miles away through the woods to school; but there was not much to be taught a reading family like ours in that log hut, and I suppose it was not thought worth while to keep us at it. No impression of it remains to me, except the wild, lonesome cooing of the turtle-doves when they began to nest in the neighboring oaks.
Our new house got on slowly. The log cabin had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer, and 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. 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. 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 little village, namely, two miles away.
I try to give merely a child’s memories 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. 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 for her. 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.
In the summer evenings, after her long hard day’s work was done, my mother sometimes strolled out upon the island with my father, and loitered on the bank to look at her boys in the river; one such evening I recall, and how sad our gay voices were in the dim, dewy air. My father had built a flatboat, which we kept on the smooth waters of our dam, and on Sunday afternoons the whole family went out in it. We rowed far up, till we struck a current from the mill above us, and then let the boat drift slowly down again. It does not now seem very exciting, but then to a boy whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty, the silence that sang in our ears, the stillness of the dam where the low uplands and the fringing sycamores and every rush and grass-blade by the brink perfectly glassed themselves with the vast blue sky overhead, were full of mystery, of divine promise, and holy awe.
I recollect the complex effort of these Sunday afternoons as if they were all one sharp event; I recall in like manner the starry summer nights, and there is one of these nights that remains single and peerless in my memory. My brother and I had been sent on an errand to some neighbor’s – for a bag of potatoes or a joint of meat; it does not matter – and we had been somehow belated, so that it was well after twilight when we started home, and the round moon was high when we stopped to rest in a piece of the lovely open woodland of that region, where the trees stood in a parklike freedom from underbrush, and the grass grew dense and rich among them. We took the pole, on which we had slung the bag, from our shoulders, and sat down on an old long-fallen log, and listened to the densely interwoven monotonies of the innumerable katydids, in which the air seemed clothed as with a mesh of sound. The shadows fell black from the trees upon the smooth sward, but every other