Chapter IV

For the boy as for the man there is the world of fancy and the world of facts. Sometimes the world of facts is very grim.

Solomon had vessels of silver, he had vessels of gold, but Tar Moorehead’s father was not a Solomon. Within a year after the Saturday evening when Tar sat in his father’s shop seeing the bright glitter of the buckles in the swaying lights, the shop had been sold to pay Dick’s debts and the Mooreheads were living in another town.

All summer Dick had been working as a house-painter but now cold weather had come and he had got a job. He was now but a workman in a harness shop and sat on the harness-maker’s horse sewing straps. The silver watch and the watch chain were gone.

The Mooreheads lived in a mean little house and all through the fall Tar had been ill. As the fall advanced there was a time of bitter cold days and then there came a period of soft days.

Tar sat on the porch wrapped in a blanket. Now the corn in distant fields was in shocks and the other crops had been hauled away. In a small field near at hand where the corn crop had not been good a farmer had gone into the field to pick the corn and then had turned cows into the field to nibble at the stalks. In the woods the red and yellow leaves were falling fast. With every gust of wind they flew like brightly colored birds across the field of Tar’s vision. In the corn field the cows making their way among the dry standing corn stalks made a low crashing sound.

Dick Moorehead had names Tar had never heard before. One day when he sat on the porch of the house a man with a board balanced across his shoulder came along the road past the house and seeing Dick Moorehead coming out at the front door stopped and spoke to him. He called Dick Moorehead “Major.” “Hello, Major,” he shouted.

The man’s hat was tilted jauntily on the side of his head and he smoked a pipe. After he and Dick had gone off along the road together Tar got up out of his chair. It was one of the days when he felt quite strong. The sun was shining.

Going around the house he found a board fallen out of a fence and tried to carry it as had the man in the road, balancing it on his shoulder as he walked up and down a path in the back yard, but it fell and an end of it hit him on the side of the head, raising a large bump.

Tar went back to sit alone on the front porch. There was to be a new baby in the house. He had heard his father and mother speak of it at night. With three children in the house younger than himself it was time he grew up.

His father was called Captain and Major. Tar’s mother sometimes called her husband Richard. How grand to be a man and have so many names.

Tar had begun to wonder if he would ever be a man. How long to wait! How annoying to be sick and not able to go to school.

Nowadays, immediately after he had bolted his food, Dick Moorehead hurried away from the house. At night he did not come home until all had gone to bed. In the new town he had joined a brass band and belonged to several lodges. When he did not have to work in the shop at night there was always a lodge to attend. Although his clothes had grown shabby Dick wore two or three brightly colored badges in the lapel of his coat and on special days gayly colored ribbons.

One Saturday evening when Dick came home from the shop something had happened.

All the house felt it. It was dark in the street outside and the evening meal had been waiting for a long time. When at last the children of the house heard their father’s footsteps on the sidewalk that led from the gate to the front door, all became silent.

How very strange. The footsteps came along the hard road outside and then stopped before the house. Now the front gate had opened and Dick was going around the house to the kitchen door where all the rest of the Moorehead family were sitting and waiting. It was one of the days when Tar felt strong and had come to the table. When the footsteps were still in the road outside, his mother stood silently in the middle of the room but as they moved about the house she hurried to the stove. When Dick came to the kitchen door she did not look at him and all through the evening meal, eaten in a strange new kind of silence, she did not speak to her husband or to the children.

Dick had been drinking. Many times when he came home during that fall he had been drinking but the children had never before seen him when he was really off balance. When he had come along the road and the path that led around the house, all of the children had recognized his footsteps that were at the same time not his footsteps. There was something wrong. All in the house felt it. Each step was taken uncertainly. The man had, quite deliberately perhaps, surrendered something of himself to some power outside himself. He had surrendered control over his faculties, his mind, his fancy, his tongue, the muscles of his own body. He was for the time quite helpless in the hands of something his children could not understand. There was a kind of assault upon the spirit of the house. At the kitchen door he lost control over himself a little and had to catch himself quickly, his hand on the door frame.

When he got into the room and had put aside his hat he went at once to where Tar sat. “Well, well, how are you, little monkey?” he cried, standing before Tar’s chair and laughing, a little foolishly. No doubt he felt the eyes of all the others upon him, felt the frightened silence of the room.

To pass it off he took Tar up in his arms and tried to go toward his place at the head of the table, to sit at the table. He almost fell. “How big you are getting,” he said to Tar. He did not look at his wife.

Being in his father’s arms was like being in the top of a tree pitched and tossed by a wind. When Dick had managed to get his balance again he got to the chair and sitting down put his cheek against Tar’s. For several days he had not shaved and there was a half-grown beard that hurt Tar’s face and his father’s long mustache was wet. His breath smelled of something strange and pungent. The smell made Tar a little ill but he did not cry. He was too frightened to cry.

The fright of the child, of all the children in the room, was something special. The feeling of discouragement that had for months brooded over the house had come to a head. Dick’s drunkenness was a kind of assertion. “Well, life has proven to be too much of a job. I shall let things go. There is a man in me and there is something else. I have tried being a man but I cannot make it. Look at me. Now I have become what I am. How do you like it?”

Watching his chance Tar crept out of his father’s arms and went to sit near his mother. All of the children of the household had instinctively edged their chairs along the floor so that the father was left quite alone, with a wide open space on either side. Tar felt feverishly strong. His brain was making strange pictures, one after the other.

He kept thinking of trees. Now his father was like a tree in the middle of a great open meadow, a tree tossed by a wind, a wind all the others, standing at the edge of the meadow, could not feel.

The strange man who had suddenly come into the house was Tar’s father and was at the same time not his father. The man’s hands kept making uncertain movements. There were baked potatoes for supper and he tried to begin serving the children by sticking a fork into a potato but missed and the fork struck on the side of the dish. It made a sharp metallic sound. He tried two or three times and then Mary Moorehead, getting up from her place, walked around the table and took the dish away. Having been served, all began eating in silence.

The silence was unbearable to Dick. There was a kind of accusation in it. All of life, now that he was married and the father of children, was a kind of accusation. “There is too much accusation. A man is what he is. You are expected to grow up, be a man, but what if you are not made that way?”

It was true Dick drank, that he did not save money, but other men were that way. “There is a lawyer in this very town who gets drunk two or three times every week but you look at him. He is successful. He makes money and dresses well. With me everything is a muddle. To tell the truth I made a mistake in being a soldier and going back on my father and brothers. I have always been making mistakes. Being a man is not so easy as it seems.

“I made a mistake when I married. I love my wife but I have been able to do nothing for her. Now she shall see me as I am. My children shall see me as I am. What do I care?”

Dick had worked himself into a state. He began to talk, addressing not his children or his wife but the kitchen stove that stood in a corner of the room. The children were eating in silence. All had grown white.

Tar turned to look at the stove. How odd, he thought, that a grown man should be talking to a stove. It was a thing such as a child like himself might have done when alone in a room but a man was a man. As his father talked he saw in fancy and quite distinctly the faces of people appearing and disappearing in the darkness back of the stove. The faces, called into being by the voice of his father, emerged quite distinctly out of the darkness back of the stove and then as rapidly disappeared. They danced in the air, became large and then small.

Dick Moorehead talked as though making a speech. There were certain men who, when he lived in another town and owned a harness shop, when he was a man of business and not, as now, a mere workman, had not paid for harnesses bought in his shop. “How can I get along if they do not pay?” he asked aloud. Now he held a small baked potato balanced on the end of a fork and began waving it about. Tar’s mother was looking at her plate but his brother John, his sister Margaret and his younger brother Robert were all looking at their father with staring eyes. As for Tar’s mother, when something happened she did not approve she went about the house with a strange lost look in her eyes. The eyes frightened. They frightened Dick Moorehead as well as the children. All became self-conscious, afraid. It was as though she had been struck a blow and when you looked at her you felt at once that your hand had delivered the blow.

The room in which the Mooreheads now sat was lighted only by a small oil lamp on the table and by the glow from the stove. As it was already late in the fall darkness had come. In the kitchen stove were many cracks through which ashes and bits of burning coal sometimes fell. The stove was bound together with wires. The Mooreheads were indeed very hard up just at that time. They had reached the low stage in all the memories Tar afterward kept of his childhood.

Dick Moorehead declared his position in life a terrible one. In the house at the table he kept looking into the darkness back of the kitchen stove and thinking of the men who owed him money. “Look at me, I am in a certain position. Well, I have a wife and children. I have these children to feed and men owe me money they do not pay. I am down and out and they laugh at me. I want to do my part like a man but how can I manage?”

The drunken man began calling out a long list of names of men who he declared owed him money and Tar listened filled with wonder. It was an odd circumstance that when he grew to be a man and became a writer of tales Tar remembered many of the names called out by his father that evening. Many of them were afterwards attached to characters in stories of his.

His father called off names and condemned the men who had not paid for harnesses bought when he was prosperous and owned a shop of his own but Tar did not afterward connect the names with his father or with any injustice done to his father.

Something had happened. Tar sat on a chair near his mother facing the stove in the corner.

Light appeared and disappeared on the wall. As Dick talked he held the small baked potato balanced on the end of a fork. The baked potato made dancing shadows on the face of the wall.

The outline of faces began to appear. As Dick Moorehead talked a movement began in the shadows.

One by one the names were called and then the faces appeared. Where had Tar seen the faces before? They were the faces of men seen passing the Moorehead house, faces seen traveling on trains, faces seen from the seat of the buggy, that time Tar went into the country.

There was a man with a gold tooth and an old man with his hat pulled down over his eyes and these were followed by others. The man who had balanced the board on his shoulder and who had called Tar’s father “the Major,” came out of the shadows to stand looking at Tar. The illness from which Tar had been suffering and from which he had begun to recover was now coming back. The cracks in the stove made dancing lights on the floor.

The faces Tar saw emerging so suddenly out of darkness and then so quickly disappearing again, he did not connect with his father. Each face as it appeared had for him a life of its own.

His father kept talking in the thick angry voice and the faces kept appearing and disappearing. The meal progressed but Tar did not eat. The faces seen in the shadows did not frighten, they filled the child with wonder.

He sat by the table looking occasionally at his angry father and from him to the men who had so mysteriously come into the room. How glad he was his mother was there. Did the others see what he saw?

The faces now dancing on the walls of the room were the faces of men. Some time he would himself be a man. He watched and waited but as his father talked did not connect the faces with the words of condemnation that were coming from his lips.

Jim Gibson, Curtis Brown, Andrew Hartnett, Jacob Wills--men of an Ohio countryside, who had bought harnesses of a small harness maker and then had not paid. Names were themselves something to think about. Names were like houses, they were like pictures people hang on the walls of a room. When you see a picture you do not see what the man saw who painted the picture. When you go into a house you do not feel what the people feel who live in the house.

Names called out make a certain impression. Sounds also make pictures. There are too many pictures. When you are a child and ill the pictures crowd in upon each other too fast.

Now that he was ill Tar sat too much alone. On rainy days he sat by a window inside the house and on fair days sat on a chair on the porch.

His illness had made him habitually silent. All during his illness Tar’s older brother John and his sister Margaret had been kind. John, who nowadays had much business going on, in the yard and in the road, and who was often visited by other boys, came to bring him marbles and Margaret came to sit with him and tell him happenings at school.

Tar sat staring about and saying nothing. How could he tell any one what was going on inside. There was too much going on inside. With his weak body he could do nothing but inside his body there was intense activity.

Something peculiar there was, down inside, something constantly being torn apart and then joined together again. Tar did not understand and never did understand.

For one thing, everything kept going far away. There was a tree at the side of the road before the Moorehead house that kept coming out of the ground and floating away into the sky. Tar’s mother came to sit in the room with him. She was always at work. When she was not bending over the wash tub or over the ironing board, she was sewing. She also, the chair in which she sat, even the walls of the room, seemed to float away. Something inside Tar struggled constantly to bring everything back and put everything in its place. If things would only stay in their places how calm and nice life would be.

Tar knew nothing of death but was afraid. Things that should be small became large, things that should remain large became small. Often Tar’s own hands, white and small, seemed to leave his arms and float away. They floated away over the tops of the trees seen through the window, almost disappeared into the sky.

Not to have everything disappear was Tar’s problem. It was a problem he could not explain to any one, and absorbed him completely. Often the tree that had come out of the ground and had floated away became merely a black dot in the sky but it was his problem not to lose sight of it. If it happened that you lost sight of the tree you lost sight of everything. Tar did not know why that was true but it was. Grimly he held on.

If he held on the tree would come back, everything would come back. Some day he would get all adjusted again.

If Tar held on things would at last be all right. Of that he was quite sure.

The faces in the street before the houses in which the Mooreheads had lived had sometimes floated across the fancy of the sick boy as now in the kitchen of the Moorehead house the faces were floating on the wall back of the stove.

Tar’s father kept calling new names and new faces kept coming. Tar had grown very white.

The faces on the wall appeared and disappeared faster than ever. Tar’s white small hands gripped the edges of his chair.

Had it become a test for him to follow with his fancy all of the faces, must he keep track of them as he did of the trees when they seemed to float into the sky?

The faces had become a whirling mass. His father’s voice seemed far away.

Something slipped. Tar’s hands that had been gripping so tightly the edges of his chair let go their hold and with a little sigh he slipped from the chair to the floor, into the darkness.