Chapter VIII

Horses trotting around a race track in an Ohio town on a Sunday morning in the summer, squirrels running along the top of a worn fence, apples getting ripe in orchards.

Some of the Moorehead children went to Sunday School on Sundays, others did not. When Tar had a clean suit of Sunday clothes he sometimes went. The teacher talked of how David slew Goliath and of how Jonah fled from the Lord and concealed himself in a ship bound for Tarshish.

What a strange place that must be, that Tarshish. Words making pictures in Tar’s head. The teacher had said little enough about Tarshish. That was a mistake. Thinking of Tarshish Tar couldn’t pay attention to the rest of the lesson. If his father had been teaching the class he might have spread himself about the town, or country, or whatever it was. Why had Jonah wanted to go to Tarshish? Just at that time a passion for race horses had taken possession of Tar. He saw in fancy a wild place of yellow sand and bushes--wind swept. Men were racing horses at the edge of the sea. He may have got the notion out of a picture book. Most places that are any fun are wicked places. Jonah was fleeing from the Lord. Maybe Tarshish was the name of a race course. It would be a good name.

The Mooreheads never owned any horses and cows but there were horses pastured in a field near the Moorehead house.

A horse had funny thick lips. When Tar held an apple in his hand and put his hand through the fence the lips of the horse closed over the apple so gently he hardly felt anything at all.

Yes, he did. The funny hairy thick lips of the horse tickled the inside of the hand.

Animals were funny creatures but so were people. Tar spoke to his friend Jim Moore on the subject of dogs. “A strange dog, if you run from him and are afraid, will take after you and act as though he was going to eat you up, but if you stand still and look him right in the eye he won’t do anything. No animal can stand the steady penetrating gaze of the human eye.” Some people have a more penetrating gaze than others. It’s a good thing to have.

A boy at school had told Tar that when a strange fierce dog took after you the best thing to do was to turn your back, stoop down and look at the dog through your legs. Tar never tried it, but when he grew to be a man he read the same thing in an old book. Boys were telling other boys that same tale on the way to school in the time of the old Norse Sagas. Tar asked Jim if he had ever tried it. They both agreed they would some time. It would be a ridiculous position to be caught in though, if it did not work. It would sure be a cinch for the dog.

A better scheme is to pretend to pick up stones. There are hardly ever any good stones around when a fierce dog gets after you, but a dog is easily bluffed. It’s better to pretend to pick up a stone than to actually pick up one. If you throw your stone and miss, where are you?

You’ve got to get used to people in towns. Some are one way, some another. Older people act so strangely.

When Tar was sick that time there was an old man, a doctor, who used to come to the house. He had a good deal to do with straightening the Mooreheads out. What was wrong with Mary Moorehead was that she was almost too good.

If you are too good you think--“Well now, I’ll be patient and kind. I won’t scold, whatever happens.” In the saloon sometimes, when Dick Moorehead was spending money he should have taken home, he heard other men speaking of their wives. Most men are afraid of their wives.

The men used to say things. “I don’t want the old woman on my neck.” That was just a way of speaking. Women don’t really get on men’s necks. A panther, when he is after a deer, jumps on her neck and pins her to earth, but that wasn’t what the man in the saloon meant. He meant he would get Hail Columbia when he got home and Dick hardly ever did get Hail Columbia. Doctor Reefy said he should get it more often. Maybe he gave it to Dick himself. He might have given Mary Moorehead a stiff talking to. Tar never heard any of it. He might have said, “Look here, woman, that husband of yours needs to have the gaff put to him now and then.”

In the Moorehead house things changed, got better. Not that Dick became good. No one expected that.

Dick stayed more at home, brought more of his money home. Neighbors came in more. Dick could tell his war stories on the front porch in the presence of some neighbor man, a drayman, a man who was section boss on the Wheeling Railroad, and the children could sit and listen.

Tar’s mother had a way she always kept, of knocking the props out from under people sometimes with little side remarks, but she held herself back more and more. There are some people that, when they smile, make the whole world smile. When they freeze up every one around freezes up. Robert Moorehead got to be a good deal like his mother when he grew older. John and Will were the steady ones. The youngest one of all, little Joe Moorehead, was to be the artist of the family. Later he was what people call a genius and had a hard time making a living.

After his childhood was over, and after she had died, Tar thought his mother must have been smart. He was in love with her all his life. This trick of thinking some one is perfect does not give them much chance. Tar always, after he grew up, let his father alone--just as he was. He enjoyed thinking of him as a lovable improvident fellow. It may even have been that he afterwards attributed to Dick a lot of sins he never committed. Dick wouldn’t have objected. “Well, take some notice of me. If you can’t figure me out to be good, figure me out to be bad. Whatever you do, pay me some attention.” Something of that sort Dick would have felt. Tar was always a good deal like Dick. He liked the notion of being always in the limelight and hated it too.

It may be that you are most likely to love some one you can’t possibly be like. After Doctor Reefy began coming to the Moorehead house Mary Moorehead changed but not so much. She went to the children’s room after they had gone to bed and kissed them all.

She was like a young girl about it, did not seem able to caress them in the daylight. None of her children ever saw her kiss Dick and the sight would have startled them--shocked them a little.

If you have a mother like Mary Moorehead and she is lovely to look at--or you think she is, which is the same thing--and she dies when you are young, what you do all your life afterwards is to use her as material for dreams. It is unfair to her but you do it.

Very likely you make her sweeter than she was, kinder than she was, wiser than she was. What’s the harm?

You are always wanting some one almost perfect to think about because you know you can’t be that way yourself. If you ever do try you give up after a time.

Little Fern Moorehead died when she was three weeks old. Tar was sick in bed that time, too. After that night when Joe was born he had a fever. Then he wasn’t much good for another year. That was what brought Doctor Reefy to the house. He was the only man Tar ever knew who talked up to his mother. He made her cry. The Doctor had big funny-looking hands. He looked like pictures of Abraham Lincoln.

When Fern died Tar did not even have a chance to go to the funeral but he did not mind, was, in fact, glad. “If you have to die it’s too bad but the fuss people make is awful. It makes everything so public and kind of terrible.”

Tar escaped it all. It would be the kind of time when Dick would be at his worst and Dick at his worst would be pretty bad.

By being sick Tar missed everything and his sister Margaret had to stay at home with him and she missed it too. A boy always gets the best side of girls and women when he is sick. “It’s their chief time,” thought Tar. He thought about it sometimes in bed. “That may be why men and boys are always getting sick.”

When Tar was sick and had a fever he was out of his head a part of the time and all he ever knew of his sister Fern was a sound sometimes at night in the next room, a sound something like a tree toad. It got into the dreams of his fever time and stayed in his dreams.

Afterwards he thought Fern was more real to him than any of the others.

Even when he grew to be a man Tar used to walk along the street sometimes thinking of her. He would be walking and talking with some other man and there she would be, just ahead of him. He saw her in every lovely gesture other women made. If, when he was a young man and very susceptible to women’s charms, he said to some woman, “You make me think of my sister Fern who died,” it was the finest compliment he could pay but the woman did not seem to appreciate it. Pretty women want to stand on their own feet. They do not want to remind you of any one.

If a child in the family dies and you knew the child alive you always think of him as he was when he died. A child dies in spasms. It is terrible to think about.

But if you have never seen the child.

Tar could think of Fern as fourteen when he was fourteen. He could think of her as forty when he was forty.

Imagine Tar as a grown man. He has had a quarrel with his wife and goes out of the house in a huff. Time now to think of Fern. She is a grown woman. A little, now, he has got her confused in his mind with the figure of his dead mother.

When he grew older--up around forty--Tar always fancied Fern as about eighteen. Older men like the notion of some woman about eighteen with the wisdom of forty and the physical beauty and sweetness of girlhood. They like to think of such a one as attached to them with iron bands. It’s the way older men are.