Chapter IX

Ohio in the spring or summer, race horses trotting on a race track, corn growing in fields, little streams in narrow valleys, men going out in the spring to plow. In the fall, the nuts getting ripe in the woods about an Ohio town. Over in Europe they clean everything up. They have a lot of people and not too much land. When he grew to be a man Tar saw Europe and liked it, but all the time he was there he had an American hunger and it wasn’t a Star Spangled Banner hunger either.

What he hungered for was waste places, roominess. He wanted to see weeds growing, neglected old orchards, empty haunted houses.

An old worm fence where the elders and berries grow wild wastes a lot of land a barbed wire fence saves, but it is nice. It’s a place for a boy to crawl under and hide for a while. A man, if he is any good, never gets over being a boy.

In the woods about Middle-Western towns in Tar’s time, a world of waste places. From the top of the hill where the Mooreheads lived, after Tar got well and began to go to school, you only had to walk across a cornfield and a meadow, where the Shepards kept their cow, to get to the woods along Squirrel Creek. John was selling papers and was pretty busy, so maybe he couldn’t go along and Robert was too young.

Jim Moore lived down the road in a white, freshly-painted house and could nearly always get away. The other boys at school called him “Pee-Wee Moore,” but Tar didn’t. Jim was a year older and was pretty strong, but that wasn’t the only reason. Tar and Jim went through the standing corn, they went across the meadow.

If Jim could not go it was all right.

What Tar did when he went alone was to imagine things. His imagination made him afraid sometimes, it made him glad and happy sometimes.

The corn, when it grew high, was like a forest down under which there was always a strange soft light. It was hot down under the corn and made Tar sweat. At night his mother made him wash his feet and hands before he went to bed, so he got as dirty as he wanted to. There was nothing saved by keeping clean.

Sometimes he sprawled on the ground and lay for a long time sweating and watching the ants and bugs on the ground under the corn.

Ants, grasshoppers and bugs in general had a world of their own, birds had their world, wild animals and tame animals had their worlds. What does a pig think? Tame ducks in some one’s yard are the funniest things in the world. They are scattered around and one of them makes a honking sound and they all begin to run. The back part of a duck wobbles up and down when he runs. Their flat feet go pitter-patter, pitter-patter, the funniest sound. And then they all get together and there isn’t anything special going on. They stand looking at each other. “Well, what were you honking for? What’d you call us for, you fool?”

In the woods along a creek in a wasteful country, logs lie about rotting. There is first a cleared place and then a place so filled with brush and berry bushes, you can’t see into it. It makes a good kind of place for rabbits--or snakes.

In a woods like that there are paths everywhere, leading just nowhere. You sit on a log. If there is a rabbit in the pile of brush in front, what do you suppose he is thinking about? He sees you and you can’t see him. If there is a man and a woman rabbit, what are they saying to each other? Do you suppose a man rabbit ever gets a little lit up and comes home to sit around bragging to the neighbors about when he was in the army, the neighbors having been only privates while he was a captain? If the man rabbit does that he certainly talks pretty low. You can’t hear a word he says.