Chapter V

In the tenement districts of American cities, among the poor in small towns, strange things to be seen by a boy. Most of the houses in small Middle-Western towns are without dignity. They are cheaply made, thrown together. The walls are thin. Everything was done in a hurry. What goes on in one room is known to the child who is ill in the next room. Well, he knows nothing. What he feels is another matter. He cannot tell what he feels.

At times Tar resented his father as he resented the fact of younger children. While he was still weak with illness, that time after the drunken episode, his mother was pregnant. He did not know the word, did not know definitely that another child was coming. Still he did know.

Sometimes, on warm clear days, he sat in a rocking-chair on the front porch. At night he lay on a cot in a room next to the father and mother’s room, downstairs. John, Margaret and Robert were asleep upstairs. The baby lay in the bed with the father and mother. There was another baby in there not born yet.

Tar had already seen things, heard things.

Before he became ill his mother was tall and slender. When she worked in the kitchen there was a babe lying on a chair, among pillows. For a time the baby fed at the breast. Then he began feeding from a bottle.

What a little pig! The eyes of the baby were screwed up in a peculiar way. He was crying before he got the bottle and then, when he had got it into his mouth, he stopped at once. The tiny face got red. When the bottle was empty the baby slept.

When there is a baby in the house there are always unpleasant smells. Women and girls do not mind.

When your mother becomes suddenly round like a barrel there is a reason. John and Margaret knew. It had happened before. Some children do not apply what they see and hear going on around them to their lives. Others do. The three older children did not speak to each other of what was in the air. Robert was too young to know.

When you are a child and ill, as Tar was at that time, you get human things all mixed up in the mind with the animal life about. Cats screamed at night, cows bawled in the barns, dogs ran in packs along the road before the house. Something always stirring in people, in animals, trees, flowers, grasses. How are you going to tell what is gross, what is fine? Kittens were born, calves, colts. Neighbor women had babies. A woman who lived near the Mooreheads had two at one time. Judging from what people said hardly anything more tragic could happen.

Boys in small towns, after they begin going to school, write things on fences with chalk they steal from the schoolroom. They make pictures on the sides of barns and on the sidewalks.

Even before he began going to school Tar knew things. How had he found out? His being ill may have made him more aware. There was a queer feeling down inside--fear growing. His mother, his own relation to the tall woman going about the Moorehead house doing her housework, was in some way involved.

Tar’s being ill made things difficult. He could not run about the yard, play ball, go off on adventurous trips to nearby fields. When the baby had his bottle and was asleep his mother brought her sewing and sat beside him. All was still in the house. If things could only stay like that. Now and then her hand stroked his hair and when she stopped he wanted to ask her to go on doing it always but could not get his lips to form the words.

Two boys of the town, John’s age, went one day to a place where a small creek crossed a street. There was a wooden bridge with cracks between the boards and the boys crawled down under the bridge and lay quietly for a long time. They wanted to see something. Afterwards they came into the Moorehead yard and talked to John. Their being under the bridge had something to do with women crossing above. When they came to the Moorehead house Tar was sitting among pillows in the sun on the front porch and when they began to talk he pretended to be asleep. The boy who told John about the adventure whispered when he came to the important part but to Tar, who lay back among the pillows with his eyes closed, just the sound of the boy’s voice whispering was like cloth being torn. It was like a curtain being torn so that you stand facing--what?

On another day Tar was in the same chair on the porch and Robert was playing in the street. He went off down the road to where there was a field and presently came running back. In the field he had seen something he wanted Tar to see. He could not tell what it was but his eyes were large and round and he whispered one word over and over. “Come, come on,” he whispered and Tar got up out of the chair and went with him.

Tar was at that time so weak that as he hurried along at Robert’s heels he had to stop several times to sit beside the road. Robert danced restlessly about in the dust in the middle of the road. “What is it?” Tar kept asking but his younger brother could not tell. If Mary Moorehead had not been so occupied with the baby already born and the one about to be born she might have kept Tar at home. Among so many children one child gets lost.

The two children came to the edge of a field surrounded by a rail fence. Elders and berry bushes grew thick between the fence and the road and they were in bloom. Tar and his brother crawled in among the bushes and looked through the fence, between the rails.

What they saw was startling enough. No wonder Robert was excited. A sow had just given birth to a litter of pigs. It must have happened while Robert was running to the house to bring Tar.

The mother pig stood facing the road and the two children. Tar could look directly into her eyes. It was all a part of the day’s work with her, a part of a female pig’s life. It happened just as the trees happened to put on green leaves in the spring, just as the berry bushes happened to bloom and later bear fruit.

Only with trees, grasses, berry bushes, things were hidden from sight. Trees and bushes did not have eyes across which the shadows of pain flitted.

The mother pig stood for a moment and then lay down. She still seemed looking directly at Tar. There was something on the grass beside her, a squirming mass of life. The secret inner life of pigs was being revealed to the children. The mother pig had stiff white hairs growing on her nose and her eyes were heavy with weariness. Often Tar’s mother’s eyes looked like that. The children were so near the pig that Tar could have put out his hand and touched her hairy snout. Always, after that morning, he remembered the look in her eyes, the squirming things beside her. When he grew to be a man and was himself tired or ill he walked in city streets and saw people with that look in their eyes. People crowded into city streets, into tenements in cities, were like squirming things on the grass at the edge of an Ohio field. When he turned his eyes to the sidewalk or closed them for a moment he saw again a mother pig trying to stand on her trembling legs, lying down on the grass and then getting wearily up.

For a moment Tar watched the scene before him and then, lying down on the grass under the elders, closed his eyes. His brother Robert went away. He crawled away to where the bushes grew thicker, already looking for some new adventure.

Time passed. The elders in bloom beside the fence were very fragrant and bees came in swarms. They made a droning soft sound in the air above Tar’s head. He felt very weak and sick and wondered if he would be able to make his way back home. As he lay thus a man came along the road and, as though sensing the boy’s presence under the bushes, stopped and stood staring.

The man was a half-witted fellow who lived several doors away from the Mooreheads and on the same street. He was thirty years old but had the mind of a child of four. All Middle-Western towns have such fellows. All their lives they remain gentle or one of them becomes suddenly vicious. In small towns they live with relatives who are usually working people and are neglected by every one. People give them old clothes, too large or too small for their bodies.

The half-witted man did not see Tar. He may have heard the mother pig moving about in the field beyond the bushes. Now she had got to her feet and the little pigs--five of them--were being cleansed and prepared for life. Already they were at the business of being fed. When feeding little pigs make a sound like a babe. They screw up their eyes in the same way. Their faces get red and after they have been fed they sleep.

Some sense in feeding little pigs. They grow big rapidly and may be sold for money.

The half-witted man stood looking toward the field. Life may be a comedy half-witted people understand. The man opened his mouth and laughed softly. In Tar’s memory the scene and the moment remained unique. It seemed to him afterward that, at the moment, the sky overhead, the bushes with their blossoms, the bees droning in the air, even the ground on which he lay had begun to laugh.

* * * * *

And then the new Moorehead baby was born. It happened at night. Such things usually do. Tar was in the front room of the house, wide awake, but he managed to create the impression that he was asleep.

At first, that night when it began, there was the sound of some one groaning. It did not sound like Tar’s mother. She never groaned. Then some one moved restlessly in the bed in the next room. Dick Moorehead was awake. “Had I better get up?” A low voice answered and there was another groan. Dick hurried about getting into his clothes. He came into the front room, carrying a lamp and stood by Tar’s cot. “He’s asleep in here. Had I better wake him up and take him upstairs?” More whispered words intercepted by groans. The lamp in the bedroom shed a faint light through the open door into the room.

They had decided to let him remain. Dick put on his overcoat and went out the back way, through the kitchen door. He had put on the coat because it was raining. The rain made a steady pounding sound on the side of the house. Tar could hear his footsteps on the boards leading round the house to the front gate. The boards were merely thrown on the ground and some of them had become old and warped. When you stepped on them you had to be careful. In the darkness Dick had bad luck. There was a low muttered curse. He was standing in the rain rubbing his shin. Tar heard his footsteps on the sidewalk outside and then the sound grew faint. It could not be heard above the steady sound of the rain on the side walls of the house.

Tar lay, listening intensely. He was like a young quail crouched under leaves when a dog is ranging a field. Not a muscle of his body moved. In a household like the Mooreheads’ a child does not run instinctively to the mother. Love, warmth, the natural expression of tenderness, all such impulses are buried away. Tar had to live his own life, lie quiet and wait. Most Middle-Western families of the old days were like that.

Tar lay listening a long time. His mother groaned softly. She stirred in her bed. What was going on?

Tar knew because he had seen the pigs born in the field, knew because what was happening in the Moorehead house was always happening in some house on a street in which the Mooreheads lived. It happened to neighbor women and to horses, to dogs, to cows. Chickens, turkeys and birds got born out of eggs. That was much better. The mother bird did not groan with pain while it was going on.

It would have been better, Tar thought, if he had not seen the thing in the field, if he had not seen the look of pain in a mother pig’s eyes. His own illness had been something special. His body was weak sometimes but there was no pain. It was a thing of dreams, of distorted dreams that would not come to an end. He always, when the bad times were on, had to hold on to something to keep from falling away into nothingness, into some black cold dismal place.

If Tar had not seen the mother pig in the field, if older boys had not come into the yard and talked....

The mother pig, standing in the field, had a look of pain in her eyes. She made a sound that was like a groan.

She had long dirty white hairs on her nose.

The sound coming from the nearby room did not seem to come from Tar’s mother. She was to him something lovely. He clung to that thought. What was going on was shocking. It could not happen to her.

That was a comforting thought when it came. He held on to the thought. There was a trick his illness had taught him. When he felt he was about to fall into darkness, into nothingness, he just hung on. There was something inside him that helped.

Once that night, during the period of waiting, Tar crept out of bed. He was quite sure his mother was not in the next room, that it was not she he heard groaning in there but he wanted to be quite sure. He would creep to the door and look. When he had got his feet to the floor and stood upright the groans in the room stopped. “Well, you see,” he told himself, “what I heard was just made up.” He got silently back into bed and the groans started again.

His father came with the doctor. He had never been to the house before. Such things happen unexpectedly. The doctor you plan to get is out of town. He had gone off to a patient in the country. You do the best you can.

The doctor was a large man with a great voice. He came into the house with his booming voice and a neighbor woman also came. Tar’s father came and closed the door that led into the bedroom.

Again he got out of bed but did not go toward the door leading to the bedroom. He knelt beside the cot and felt around until he had got hold of the pillow and then buried his face. He pressed the pillow against his cheeks. In that way it was possible to shut out all sound.

What Tar achieved was a sense of nearness to his mother. She could not be in the next room groaning. Where was she? Birth was a thing belonging to the world of pigs, to cows and horses, and to other women. What was happening in the next room was not happening to her. His own breath, after his face had been for a few moments buried in the pillow, made a warm place. The dreary sound of the rain outside the house, the booming sound of the doctor’s voice, the queer apologetic voice of his father, the neighbor woman’s voice--all sounds were shut out. His mother had gone away somewhere but he could hold on to his thoughts of her. It was a trick his illness had taught him.

Once or twice, since he had been old enough to be conscious of such things, and in particular since he had been ill, his mother had taken him into her arms and had pressed his face against her body. That was at a moment when the younger baby in the house was asleep. If there were no babies it would happen oftener.

With his face buried in the pillow, his arms embracing it, he achieved the illusion.

Well, he did not want his mother to have another baby. He did not want her to lie groaning in a bed. He wanted her in the dark room with himself.

In fancy he could bring her there. When you have an illusion hang on.

Tar hung on grimly. Time passed. When at last he lifted his face from the pillow all was quiet in the house. The silence frightened him a little.

Now he thought himself quite convinced nothing had happened.

He went softly to the bedroom door and opened it softly. There was a lamp on a table and his mother was lying in the bed with her eyes closed. She was very white. Dick Moorehead was in the kitchen sitting in a chair by the stove. He had got wet going out into the rain and was drying his clothes.

The neighbor woman had water in a pan and was washing something.

Tar stood by the door until the new baby cried. It had to be dressed now. Now it would begin to wear clothes. It would not be like a little pig, a puppy, a kitten. Its clothes would not grow on it. It would have to be taken care of, dressed, washed. After a time it would begin to dress itself, wash itself. Tar already did that.

Now he could accept the fact of the new baby. It was the matter of being born he could not bear. Now it was done.

He stood by the door trembling and when the baby cried his mother opened her eyes. It had cried before but with the pillow pressed against his ears Tar had not heard. His father sitting in the kitchen did not move. He sat staring at the lighted stove, a discouraged looking figure. Steam arose from his clothes.

Nothing moved but the eyes of Tar’s mother and he did not know whether or not she saw him standing there. The eyes seemed to be looking reproachfully at him and he backed softly out of the room into the darkness.

* * * * *

In the morning Tar went into the bedroom with John, Robert and Margaret. Margaret went at once to the new babe. She kissed it. Tar did not look. He, John and Robert stood at the foot of the bed and said nothing. There was something stirring, under the covers, beside the mother. They were told it was a boy.

They went outside. After the rain of the night the morning was bright and clear. Fortunately for John, a boy of his own age came along the street and he called to him and hurried off.

Robert went into the woodshed at the back of the house. He had business going on in there with wooden blocks.

Well, he was all right and so was Tar. The worst was over. Dick Moorehead would go uptown and into a saloon. He had been through a hard night and would want a drink. While he was drinking he would tell the bartender the news and the bartender would smile. John would tell the neighbor boy. It might be he already knew. In a small town such news travels fast. For a few days the boys and the father would alike be half ashamed, with a kind of queer secret shame, and then it would pass off.

In time they would accept the new babe as one of themselves.

Tar was weak from his night’s adventure but so also was his mother. John and Robert felt the same way. It had been a strange hard night in the house and now that it was over Tar was relieved. He would not have to think about it again. A babe is just a babe but to a boy an unborn babe in the house is something he is glad to see come out into the light.