Ward Moore
(1903-1978)
Although I am writing this
in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921. Neither the dates nor the
tenses are error--let me explain:
I was born, as I say, in
1921, but it was not until the early 1930s, when I was about ten, that
I began to understand what a peculiarly frustrated and disinherited world
was about me. Perhaps my approach to realization was through the crayon
portrait of Granpa Hodgins which hung, very solemnly, over the mantel.
Granpa Hodgins, after whom
I was named, perhaps a little grandiloquently, Hodgins McCormick Backmaker,
had been a veteran of the War of Southron Independence. Like so many young
men he had put on a shapeless blue uniform in response to the call of the
ill-advised and headstrong--or martyred--Mr. Lincoln. Depending on which
of my lives' viewpoints you take.
Granpa lost an arm on the
Great Retreat to Philadelphia after the fall of Washington to General Lee's
victorious Army of Northern Virginia, so his war ended some six months
before the capitulation at Reading and the acknowledgment of the independence
of the Confederate States on July 4, 1864. One-armed and embittered, Granpa
came home to Wappinger Falls and, like his fellow veterans, tried to remake
his life in a different and increasingly hopeless world.
On its face the Peace of
Richmond was a just and even generous disposition of a defeated foe by
the victor. (Both sides--for different reasons--remembered the mutiny of
the Unreconstructed Federals in the Armies of the Cumberland and the Tennessee
who, despite defeat at Chattanooga, could not forget Vicksburg or Port
Hudson and fought bloodily against the order to surrender.) The South could
easily have carved the country up to suit its most fiery patriots, even
to the point of detaching the West and making a protectorate of it. Instead,
the chivalrous Southrons contented themselves with drawing the new boundary
along traditional lines. The Mason-Dixon gave them Delaware and Maryland,
but they generously returned the panhandle of western Virginia jutting
above it. Missouri was naturally included in the Confederacy, but of the
disputed territory Colorado and Deseret were conceded to the old Union;
only Kansas and California as well as--for obvious defensive reasons--Nevada's
tip went to the South.
But the Peace of Richmond
had also laid the cost of the war on the beaten North, and this was what
crippled Granpa Hodgins more than the loss of his arm. The postwar inflation
entered the galloping stage during the Vallandigham Administration, became
dizzying in the time of President Seymour, and precipitated the food riots
of 1873 and '74. It was only after the election of President Butler by
the Whigs in 1876 and the reorganization and drastic deflation following
that money and property became stable, but by this time all normal values
were destroyed. Meanwhile the indemnities had to be paid regularly in gold.
Granpa and hundreds of thousands like him just never seemed to get back
on their feet.
How well I remember, as a
small boy in the 1920s and '30s, my mother and father talking bitterly
of how the war had ruined everything. They were not speaking of the then
fairly recent Emperors' War of 1914-16, but of the War of Southron Independence
which still, nearly seventy years later, blighted what was left of the
United States.
Nor were they unique or peculiar
in this. Men who slouched in the smithy while Father shod their horses,
or gathered every month around the post office waiting for the notice of
the winning lottery numbers to be put up, as often cursed the Confederates
or discussed what might have been if Meade had been a better general or
Lee a worse one, as they did the new-type bicycles with clockwork auxiliaries
to make pedaling uphill easier, or the latest scandal about the French
emperor Napoleon VI.
I tried to imagine what it
must have been like in Granpa Hodgins's day, to visualize the lost past--that
strange bright era when, if it could be believed, folk like ourselves and
our neighbors had owned their farms outright and didn't pay rent to the
bank or give half the crop to a landlord. I searched the wiggling crayon
lines that composed Granpa Hodgins's face for some sign that set him apart
from his descendants.
"But what did he do to lose
the farm?" I used to ask my mother.
"Do? Didn't do anything.
Couldn't help himself. Go along now and do your chores; I've a terrible
batch of work to get out."
How could Granpa's not doing
anything result so disastrously? I could not understand this any more than
I could the bygone time when a man could nearly always get a job for wages
which would support himself and a family, before the system of indenture
became so common that practically the only alternative to pauperism was
to sell oneself to a company.
Indenting I understood all
right, for there was a mill in Wappinger Falls which wove a shoddy cloth
very different from the goods my mother produced on her hand loom. Mother,
even in her late forties, could have indented there for a good price, and
she admitted that the work would be easier than weaving homespun to compete
with their product. But, as she used to say with an obstinate shake of
her head, "Free I was born and free I'll die."
In Granpa Hodgins's day,
if one could believe the folktales or family legends, men and women married
young and had large families; there might have been five generations between
him and me instead of two. And many uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers, and
sisters. Now late marriages and only children were the rule.
If it hadn't been for the
war ... This was the basic theme stated with variations suited to the particular
circumstance. If it hadn't been for the war the most energetic young men
and women would not turn to emigration; visiting foreigners would not come
as to a slum; and the great powers would think twice before sending troops
to restore order every time one of their citizens was molested. If it hadn't
been for the war the detestable buyer from Boston--detestable to my mother,
but rather fascinating to me with his brightly colored vest and smell of
soap and hair tonic--would not have come regularly to offer her a miserable
price for her weaving.
"Foreigner!" she would always
exclaim after he left; "Sending good cloth out of the country."
Once my father ventured,
"He's only doing what he's paid for."
"Trust a Backmaker to stand
up for foreigners. Like father, like son; suppose you'd let the whole thieving
crew in if you had your way."
So was first hinted the scandal
of Grandfather Backmaker. No enlarged portrait of him hung anywhere, much
less over the mantel. I got the impression my father's father had been
not only a foreigner by birth, but a shady character in his own right,
a man who kept on believing in the things for which Granpa Hodgins fought
after they were proved wrong. I don't know how I learned that Grandfather
Backmaker had made speeches advocating equal rights for Negroes or protesting
the mass lynchings so popular in the North, in contrast to the humane treatment
accorded these noncitizens in the Confederacy. Nor do I remember where
I heard he had been run out of several places before finally settling in
Wappinger Falls or that all his life people had muttered darkly at his
back, "Dirty Abolitionist!"--a very deep imprecation indeed. I only know
that as a consequence of this taint my father, a meek, hardworking, worried
little man, was completely dominated by my mother who never let him forget
that a Hodgins or a McCormick was worth dozens of Backmakers.
I must have been a sore trial
to her for I showed no sign of proper Hodgins gumption, such as she displayed
herself and which surely kept us all--though precariously--free. For one
thing I was remarkably unhandy and awkward, of little use in the hundred
necessary chores around our dilapidated house. I could not pick up a hammer
at her command to do something about fixing the loose weatherboards on
the east side without mashing my thumb or splitting the aged, unpainted
wood. I could not hoe the kitchen garden without damaging precious vegetables
and leaving weeds intact. I could shovel snow in the winter at a tremendous
rate for I was strong and had endurance, but work requiring manual dexterity
baffled me. I fumbled in harnessing Bessie, our mare, or hitching her to
the cart for my father's trips to Poughkeepsie, and as for helping him
on the farm or in his smithy, I'm afraid my efforts drove that mild man
nearest to a temper he ever came. He would lay the reins on the plowhorse's
back or his hammer down on the anvil and say mournfully:
"Better see if you can help
your mother, Hodge. You're only in my way here."
On only one score did I come
near pleasing Mother: I learned to read and write early, and exhibited
some proficiency. But even here there was a flaw; she looked upon literacy
as something which distinguished Hodginses and McCormicks from the ruck
who had to make their mark, as an accomplishment which might somehow and
unspecifically lead away from poverty. I found reading an end in itself,
which probably reminded her of my father's laxity or Grandfather Backmaker's
subversion.
"Make something of yourself,
Hodge," she admonished me often. "You can't change the world"--an obvious
allusion to Grandfather Backmaker--"but you can do something with it as
it is if you try hard enough. There's always some way out."
Yet she did not approve of
the post-office lottery, on which so many pinned their hopes of escape
from poverty or indenture. In this she and my father were agreed; both
believed in hard work rather than chance.
Still, chance could help
even the steadiest toiler. I remember the time a minibile--one of the small,
trackless locomotives--broke down not a quarter of a mile from Father's
smithy. This was a golden, unparalleled, unbelievable opportunity. Minibiles,
like any other luxury, were rare in the United States, though they were
common enough in prosperous countries such as the German Union or the Confederacy.
We had to rely for our transportation on the never-failing horse or on
the railroads, worn out and broken down as they were. For decades the great
issue in Congress was the never-completed Pacific transcontinental line,
though British America had one and the Confederate States seven. (Sailing
balloons, economical and fairly common, were still looked upon with some
suspicion.) Only a rare millionaire, with connections in Frankfurt, Washington-Baltimore,
or Leesburg, could afford to indulge in a costly and complicated minibile
requiring a trained driver to bounce it over the rutted and chuckholed
roads. Only an extraordinarily adventurous spirit would leave the tar-surfaced
streets of New York or its sister city of Brooklyn, where the minibiles'
solid rubber tires could at worst find traction on the horse or cablecar
rails, for the morasses or washboard roads which were the only highways
north of the Harlem River.
When one did, the jolting,
jouncing, and shaking inevitably broke or disconnected one of the delicate
parts in its complex mechanism. Then the only recourse--apart from telegraphing
back to the city if the traveler broke down near an instrument--was the
closest blacksmith. Smiths rarely knew much of the principles of the minibiles,
but with the broken part before them they could fabricate a passable duplicate
and, unless the machine had suffered severe damage, put it back in place.
It was customary for such a craftsman to compensate himself for the time
taken away from horseshoeing or spring-fitting--or just absently chewing
on an oat straw--by demanding exorbitant remuneration, amounting to perhaps
twenty-five or thirty cents an hour, thus avenging his rural poverty and
self-sufficiency upon the effete wealth and helplessness of the urban excursionist.
Such a golden opportunity
befell my father, as I said, during the fall of 1933, when I was twelve.
The driver had made his way to the smithy, leaving the owner of the minibile
marooned and fuming in the enclosed passenger seat. A hasty visit convinced
Father, who could repair a clock or broken rake with equal dexterity, that
his only course was to bring the machine to the forge where he could heat
and straighten a part not easy to disassemble. (The driver, the owner,
and Father all repeated the name of the part often enough, but so inept
have I been with "practical" things all my life that I couldn't recall
it ten minutes, much less thirty years later.)
"Hodge, run and get the mare
and ride over to Jones's. Don't try to saddle her--go bareback. Ask Mr.
Jones to kindly lend me his team."
"I'll give the boy a quarter
dollar for himself if he's back with the team in twenty minutes," added
the owner of the minibile, sticking his head out of the window.
I won't say I was off like
the wind, for my life's work has given me a distaste for exaggeration or
hyperbole, but I moved faster than I ever had before. A quarter, a whole
shining silver quarter, a day's full wage for the boy who could find odd
jobs, half the day's pay of a grown man who wasn't indented or worked extra
hours--all for myself, to spend as I wished!
I ran all the way back to
the barn, led Bessie out by her halter, and jumped on her broad back, my
enthralling daydream growing and deepening each moment. With my quarter
safely got I could perhaps persuade my father to take me along on his next
trip to Poughkeepsie; in the shops there I could find some yards of figured
cotton for Mother, or a box of cigars to which Father was partial but rarely
bought for himself, or an unimagined something for Mary McCutcheon, some
three years older than I, with whom it had so recently become disturbing
as well as imperative to wrestle, in secret of course so as not to show
oneself unmanly in sporting with a weak girl instead of another boy.
It never even occurred to
me, as it would have to most, to invest in an eighth of a lottery ticket.
Not only were my parents sternly against this popular gamble, but I myself
felt a strangely puritanical aversion to meddling with my fortune.
Or I could take the entire
quarter into Newman's Book and Clock Store. Here I could not afford one
of the latest English or Confederate books--even the novels I disdained
cost fifty cents in their original and thirty in the pirated United States'
edition--but what treasures there were in the twelve-and-a-half-cent reprints
and the dime classics!
With Bessie's legs moving
steadily beneath me I pored over in my imagination Mr. Newman's entire
stock, which I knew by heart from examinations lulled by the steady ticking
of his other, and no doubt more salable, merchandise. My quarter would
buy two reprints, but I would read them in as many evenings and be no better
off than before until their memory faded and I could read them again. Better
to invest in paperback adventure stories giving sharp, breathless pictures
of life in the West or rekindling the glories of the war. True, they were
written almost entirely by Confederate authors, and I was, perhaps thanks
to Granpa Hodgins and my mother, a devout partisan of the lost cause of
Sheridan and Sherman and Thomas. But patriotism couldn't steel me against
the excitement of the Confederate paperbacks; literature simply ignored
the boundary stretching to the Pacific.
I had finally determined
to invest all my twenty-five cents, not in five paperbound volumes but
in ten of the same in secondhand or shopworn condition, when I suddenly
realized that I had been riding Bessie for some considerable time. I looked
around, rather dazed by the abrupt translation from the dark and slightly
musty interior of Newman's store to the bright countryside, to find with
dismay that Bessie hadn't taken me to the Jones farm after all but on some
private tour of her own in the opposite direction.
I'm afraid this little anecdote
is pointless--it was momentarily pointed enough for me that evening, for
in addition to the loss of the promised quarter I received a thorough whacking
with a willow switch from my mother after my father had, as usual, dolefully
refused his parental duty--except perhaps that it shows how in pursuing
the dream I could lose the reality.
My feeling that books were
a part of life, and the most important part, was no passing phase. Other
boys in their early teens dreamed of going to the wilds of Dakotah, Montana,
or Wyoming, indenting to a company run by a young and beautiful woman--this
was also a favorite paperback theme--discovering the loot hidden by a gang,
or emigrating to Australia or the South African Republic. Or else they
faced the reality of indenture, carrying on the family farm, or petty trade.
I only wanted to be allowed to read.
I knew this ambition, if
that is the proper word, to be outrageous and unheard of. It was also practically
impossible. The school at Wappinger Falls, a survival from the days of
compulsory attendance and an object of doubt in the eyes of the taxpayers,
taught as little as possible as quickly as possible. Parents needed the
help of their children to survive or to build up a small reserve in the
illusory hope of buying free of indenture. Both my mother and my teachers
looked askance at my longing to persist past an age when my contemporaries
were making themselves economically useful.
Nor, even supposing I had
the fees, could the shabby, fusty Academy at Poughkeepsie--originally designed
for the education of the well-to-do--provide what I wanted. Not that I
was clear at all as to just what this was; I only knew that commercial
arithmetic, surveying, or any of the other subjects taught there, were
not the answer to my desires.
There was certainly no money
for any college. Our position had grown slowly worse; my father talked
of selling the smithy and indenting. My dreams of Harvard or Yale were
as idle as Father's of making a good crop and getting out of debt. Nor
did I know then, as I was to find out later, that the colleges were increasingly
provincialized and decayed, contrasting painfully with the flourishing
universities of the Confederacy and Europe. The average man asked what
the United States needed colleges for anyway; those who attended them only
learned discontent and to question time-honored institutions. Constant
scrutiny of the faculties, summary firing of all instructors suspected
of abnormal ideas, did not seem to improve the situation or raise the standards
of teaching.
My mother, now that I was
getting beyond the switching age, lectured me firmly and at length on idleness
and self-indulgence. "It's a hard world, Hodge, and no one's going to give
you anything you don't earn. Your father's an easygoing man; too easygoing
for his own good, but he always knows where his duty lies."
"Yes, ma'am," I responded
politely, not quite seeing what she was driving at.
"Hard, honest work--that's
the only thing. Not hoping or wishing or thinking miracles will happen
to you. Work hard and keep yourself free. Don't depend on circumstances
or other people, and don't blame them for your own shortcomings. Be your
own man. That's the only way you'll ever be where you want to."
She spoke of responsibility
and duty as though they were measurable quantities, but the gentler parts
of such equations, the factors of affection and pity, were never mentioned.
I don't want to give the impression that ours was a particularly puritanical
family; I know our neighbors had of necessity much the same grim outlook.
But I felt guiltily vulnerable, not merely on the score of wanting more
schooling, but because of something else which would have shocked my mother
beyond forgiveness.
My early tussles with Mary
McCutcheon had the natural consequences, but she had found me a too-youthful
partner and had taken her interests elsewhere. For my part I now turned
to Agnes Jones, a suddenly alluring young woman grown from the skinny kid
I'd always brushed away. Agnes sympathized with my aspirations and encouraged
me most pleasantly. However, her spe-cific plans for my future were limited
to marrying her and helping her father on his farm, which seemed no great
advance over what I could look forward to at home.
And there I was certainly
no asset; I ate three hearty meals a day and occupied a bed. I was conscious
of the looks and smiles which followed me. A great lout of seventeen, too
lazy to do a stroke of work, always wandering around with his head in the
clouds or lying with his nose stuck in a book. Too bad; and the Backmakers
such industrious folk, too. I could feel what the shock of my behavior
with Agnes added to my idleness would be to my mother.
Yet I was neither depraved
nor very different from the other youths of Wappinger Falls, who not only
took their pleasures where they found them, but often more forcibly than
persuasively. I did not analyze it fully or clearly, but I was at least
to some extent aware of the essentially loveless atmosphere around me.
The rigid convention of late marriages bred an exaggerated respect for
chastity which had two sides: sisters' and daughters' honor was sternly
avenged with no protest from society, and undiscovered seduction produced
that much more gratification. But both retribution and venery were somewhat
mechanical; they were the expected rather than the inescapable passions.
Revivalists--and we country people had a vast fondness for those itinerants
who came periodically to castigate us for our sins--denounced our laxity
and pointed to the virtues of our grandparents and great-grandparents.
We accepted their advice with such modifications as suited us, which was
not at all what they intended.
And this was how I took my
mother's admonition to be my own man. What debts I owed her and my father
seemed best discharged by relieving them of the burden of my keep, since
I was clearly not fitting myself to reverse the balance. The notion that
there was an emotional obligation on either side hardly occurred to me;
I doubt if it did to them. Toward Agnes Jones I felt no debt at all.
A few months after my seventeenth
birthday I packed my three most cherished books in my good white cotton
shirt and, having bade a most romantic good-bye to Agnes, one which would
certainly have consummated her hopes had her father come upon us, I left
Wappinger Falls and set out for New York.
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