America Moved. Booth Tarkington
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and the charms that tingled into my heart from her were her flopping curls, her brilliant rose-and-white complexion, her clicky slippers, and the piercing silver voice with which she sang, “Oh, I’m happy, yes, as happy as can be!”
Almost all of the little girls I knew roused in me a feeling of annoyance, particularly those in my sister’s Sunday-school class when she had them come to our house for games and cake and lemonade. I was so bitter with them that once when one of them triumphed in argument with me by throwing my new straw hat over the fence, and I could obtain no redress from either my sister or my mother, I decided to run away from home—and did, for as much as two hours. This song-and-dance little girl, transcendently different, sweet, and glittering, was a beautiful revelation. I had dazzling fancies. Sometime, somehow, in a world apart, maybe she would perpetually sing and dance and I would forever look and listen.
Tribal Experience
On the train to Greencastle, next day, with my mother, I heard the car wheels clicking “Oh, I’m happy, yes, as happy as can be!” and amber curls ethereally bounced on spangled pink shoulders in my mind’s beglamoured eye; but when we arrived at Uncle George’s house and saw the solemn crape upon the front door, I was all interest in the tribal experience for the first time awaiting me. Figures in black moved hushedly about the house; the smell of tuberoses was powerful, and in the parlor there was Uncle George, stately, in his open coffin, waiting for his funeral on the morrow.
My mother was taken upstairs to my widowed aunt and her daughters; I was left alone—and presently, for a few moments, alone with Uncle George. I looked at him earnestly and became aware that he was not there; that the figure in the coffin was not a person at all. Out of curiosity, and with no other feeling whatever, I touched the chill forehead and at once found my investigative forefinger distasteful. Then, as people in black came softly into the room, whispering appropriate lamentations, I stepped out of the side door and into the big sunshiny yard.
There was an orchard behind the house, and, walking slowly with my head bent in imitation of the people I’d seen indoors, I went to stand mournfully beneath the apple trees. I looked as sorrowful as I possibly could, in case anybody should glance from a window; and I was startled when my Cousin George, Uncle George’s son, not long out of college, came briskly from the house and called in a cheerful voice, “Hello! How’s young Boothie?”
I’d heard that he and his father had never been very congenial; nevertheless, I was shocked by Cousin George’s lively manner. I thought his naturalness misplaced—the wrong etiquette for the occasion—and, during the short talk we had about our health and the weather, I didn’t let him divert me from what I believed my plain duty as a funeral guest. I kept my face mournful and spoke in a low voice, mainly monosyllables, trying to seem on the verge of breaking down completely with my grief for Uncle George.
This was my manner throughout the day and evening, and during the obsequial ceremonies of the next day. A stranger seeing me might have thought I’d been closer to Uncle George than almost anybody’d been. I was sure this was the effect called for, and, as I came prominently forth from the house, a member of the mourning family, to go to the cemetery, I saw respectful spectators in the yard and on the sidewalk and wished that the transcendent rose-and-gold little circus girl could see me then. In my thoughts she occupied almost as large a place as I did, myself, at Uncle George’s funeral.
The other grown person—the one I didn’t know—for whom my boyish anxieties became acute was the President of the United States, General Garfield. Every year, with the Chapman family, two branches of the Hendrickses, and half a dozen other neighborly intimates, we had a Fourth of July we dreamed about—the sylvan games, bosky wanderings, and rare foods of an all-day picnic in the woods far out of town —and for the children of this association of old friends the Fourth meant the rose-lighted festival of all the year. On the second of the month that year the President was shot down by an assassin. Trying to act the man, I asked my parents as calmly as I could if the picnic would have to be given up.
Grave, they said, yes, of course; there couldn’t be any kind of Fourth of July celebration anywhere unless the surgeons in Washington should decide the next day that General Garfield was going to get well. I wasn’t one solitary little monster; every boy I saw on the third of July was as passionately hopeful as I that those doctors in Washington would issue the right kind of bulletins, no matter what. But the eve of the Fourth came, no preliminary rockets hissed up over the housetops, and the nation was in gloom. Late on the morning of the Fourth the news became more encouraging: the President had a chance; and after hesitant consultations it was decided that there were to be no firecrackers, but to the great question—the picnic—the answer at last was yes.
Noon had passed before the family carriages came lurching one by one through the green woods, and immediately the baskets were unpacked and the long white tablecloths laid upon the grass. An hour later, partly gorged, the boys all instinctively withdrew themselves far from the elders and maidens of the tribe; we ran yelping and chasing one another through the woodland until we were securely distant, out of earshot, and had found a stream. Upon its bank we gathered in a chattering clump; a thing forbidden was revealed.
Woodland Casualty
One of us, an adventurous boy, Chase Walker, had it—a pistol. He had blank cartridges, too—he’d not been able to acquire any with bullets, though he’d tried—but he showed us how he could shoot at a mark just the same.
He took small pebbles from the edge of the little creek, pushed them into the muzzle of the pistol, and, with the unsharpened end of a lead pencil, rammed down a wad of paper after them. For a target he fastened a torn bit of newspaper against the rough bark of a tree; then, retiring a few feet, fired and proudly showed two or three holes in the paper made by the pebbles.
He was generous, let all of us shoot pebbles at the mark until he and we found the sport monotonous and tired of it. We waded in the stream, caught crawdads, discovered a deep hole, and went swimming. We sunburned ourselves upon a sandbank, held our heads under water, and clinked stones together to see how much it made our ears hurt; we rioted waterily till the length of our thin shadows on the sandbank made us think of spicy foods again. It would be picnic suppertime soon. Chase Walker, sitting on a large rock at the edge of the sandbank, fired his pistol at a sapling; then reloaded it with pebbles, cocked it to shoot again, but decided that he’d better begin dressing instead.
People sometimes say, “It’s a wonder any boy ever lives to grow up!” and, remembering how many times I was near drowning, what weeds, roots, and wild berries I tried to find edible, and how often I just saved myself on roofs, though I was the least daring of my kind, I think there’s something in the saying. Chase Walker sat on his rock, dabbling his feet in the water and preparing a pebble-loaded pistol to be carried in his pocket. With the muzzle resting upon his bare leg, as he sat, he held the hammer back with his thumb and pressed the trigger. The hammer should have been restrained by his thumb, but wasn’t; the pistol uttered its sharp report—and there was Chase staring, mystified, at a nasty red-and-black spot just above his right knee. Then his face was contorted and he began to whimper a little.
“What can I do?” he said.
We couldn’t tell him; he appeared to be ruined and already we were thinking of something else. Nothing was more severely forbidden to every one of us than to have anything to do with a pistol; and, now that Chase had shot himself with one, our alarm—for ourselves—was acute. It gave us, too, a distaste for Chase; but we helped him to tie a wet handkerchief round his leg and to get into his clothes. Then, after several trials and collapses, he found that he could progress hobblingly and we set forth.
For a while some of us lingered scaredly along in the rear with Chase; but when we began to hear distant adult shouts calling us to the picnic supper, the first law of Nature asserted itself. Already the two or three youngest, and therefore most instinctive, were far ahead. Scattering ourselves—every boy for himself—we arrived singly in the glade where our elders and the maidens sat upon the grass, feasting.
We found our places quietly, very quietly; said nothing unless spoken to and carefully didn’t look at one another. Seated, we ate slowly—until all of us paused in both eating and breathing when Chase