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CHAPTER ONE
A HOOSIER HOLIDAY
THE ROSE WINDOW
It was at a modest evening reception I happened to be
giving to a new poet of renown that the idea of the holiday
was first conceived. I had not seen Franklin, subsequent
companion of this pilgrimage, in all of eight or nine months, his
work calling him in one direction, mine in another. He is an
illustrator of repute, a master of pen and ink, what you would
call a really successful artist. He has a studio in New York,
another in Indiana--his home town--a car, a chauffeur,
and so on.
I first met Franklin ten years before, when he was fresh
from Indiana and working on the Sunday supplement of a
now defunct New York paper. I was doing the same. I was
drawn to him then because he had such an air of
unsophisticated and genial simplicity while looking so much
the artist. I liked his long, strong aquiline nose, and his hair of
a fine black and silver, though he was then only twenty-seven
or eight. It is now white--a soft, artistic shock of it, glistening
white. Franklin is a Christian Scientist, or dreamy
metaphysician, a fact which may not commend him in the
eyes of many, though one would do better to await a full
metaphysical interpretation of his belief. It would do almost as
well to call him a Buddhist or a follower of the Bhagavad Gita.
He has no hard and fast Christian dogmas in mind. In fact, he
is not a Christian at all, in the accepted sense, but a genial,
liberal, platonic metaphysician. I know of no better way to
describe him. Socalled sin, as something wherewith to
reproach one, does not exist for him. He has few complaints
to make concerning people's weaknesses
or errors. Nearly everything is well. He lives happily
along, sketching landscapes and trees and drawing many fine
simplicities and perfections. There is about him a soothing
repose which is not religious but human, which I felt, during
all the two thousand miles we subsequently idled together.
Franklin is also a very liberal liver, one who does not believe
in stinting himself of the good things of the world as he goes--a
very excellent conclusion, I take it.
At the beginning of this particular evening nothing was
farther from my mind than the idea of going back to Indiana.
Twentyeight years before, at the age of sixteen, I had left
Warsaw, the last place in the state where I had resided. I had
not been in the town of my birth, Terre Haute, Indiana, since
I was seven. I had not returned since I was twelve to Sullivan
or Evansville on the Ohio River, each of which towns had
been my home for two years. The State University of Indiana
at Bloomington, in the south central portion of the state,
which had known me for one year when I was eighteen, had
been free of my presence for twentysix years.
And in that time what illusions had I not built up in
connection with my native state! Who does not allow fancy to
color his primary experiences in the world? Terre Haute! A
small city in which, during my first seven years, we lived in
four houses. Sullivan, where we had lived from my seventh to
my tenth year, in one house, a picturesque white frame on the
edge of the town. In Evansville, at 1413 East Franklin Street,
in a small brick, we had lived one year, and in Warsaw, in the
northern part of the state, in a comparatively large brick
house set in a grove of pines, we had spent four years. My
mother's relatives were all residents of this northern section.
There had been three months, between the time we left
Evansville and the time we settled in Warsaw, Kosciusko
County, which we spent in Chicago--my mother and nearly
all of the children; also six weeks, between the time we left Terre
Haute and the time we settled in Sullivan, which we spent in Vincennes,
Indiana, visiting a kindly friend.
We were very poor in those days. My father had only
comparatively recently suffered severe reverses, from which
he really never recovered. My mother, a dreamy, poetic,
impractical soul, was serving to the best of her ability as the
captain of the family ship. Most of the ten children had
achieved comparative maturity and had departed, or were
preparing to depart, to shift for themselves. Before us--us
little ones--were all our lives. At home, in a kind of intimacy
which did not seem to concern the others because we were
the youngest, were my brother Ed, two years younger than
myself; my sister Claire (or Tillie), two years older, and
occasionally my brother Albert, two years older than Claire,
or my sister Sylvia, four years older, alternating as it were in
the family home life. At other times they were out in the world
working. Sometimes there appeared on the scene, usually
one at a time, my elder brothers, Mark and Paul, and my
elder sisters, Emma, Theresa, and Mary, each named in the
order of their ascending ages. As I have said, there were ten
all told--a restless, determined, halfeducated family who,
had each been properly trained according to his or her
capacities, I have always thought might have made a
considerable stir in the world. As it was--but I will try not
to become too technical.
But in regard to all this and the material and spiritual
character of our life at that time, and what I had done and
said, and what others had done and said, what notions had
not arisen! They were highly colored ones, which might or
might not have some relationship to the character of the
country out there as I had known it. I did not know.
Anyhow, it had been one of my dearly cherished ideas that
some day, when I had the time and the money to spare, I
was going to pay a return visit to Indiana. My father had
once owned a woolen mill at Sullivan, still standing, I
understood (or its duplicate built after a fire), and he also had
managed another
at Terre Haute. I had a vague recollection of seeing him at
work in this one at Terre Haute, and of being shown about,
having a spinning jenny and a carder and a weaver explained
to me. I had fished in the Busseron near Sullivan, nearly lost
my life in the Ohio at Evansville in the dead of winter, fallen in
love with the first girls I ever loved at Warsaw. The first girl
who ever kissed me and the first girl I ever ventured to kiss
were at Warsaw. Would not that cast a celestial light over
any midwestern village, however homely?
Well, be that as it may, I had this illusion. Someday I was
going back, only in my plans I saw myself taking a train and
loafing around in each village and hamlet hours or days, or
weeks if necessary. At Warsaw I would try to find out about
all the people I had ever known, particularly the boys and
girls who went to school with me. At Terre Haute I would
look up the house where I was born and our old house in
Seventh Street, somewhere near a lumber yard and some
railroad tracks, where, in a cool, roomy, musty cellar, I had
swung in a swing hung from one of the rafters. Also in this
lumber yard and among these tracks where the cars were, I
had played with Al and Ed and other boys. Also in
Thirteenth Street, Terre Haute, somewhere there was a small
house (those were the darkest days of our poverty), where I
had been sick with the measles. My father was an ardent
Catholic. For the first fifteen years of my life I was horrified
by the grim spiritual punishments enunciated by that faith. In
this house in Thirteenth Street I had been visited by a long,
lank priest in black, who held a silver crucifix to my lips to be
kissed. That little house remains the apotheosis of earthly
gloom to me even now.
At Sullivan I intended to go out to the Basler House,
where we lived, several blocks from the local or old
Evansville and Terre Haute depot. This house, as I recalled,
was a charming thing of six or seven rooms with a large lawn,
in which roses flourished, and with a truck garden north of it
and a wonderful clover field to the
rear (or east) of it. This clover field--how shall I describe
it?--but I can't. It wasn't a clover field at all as I had come to
think of it, but a honey trove in Arcady. An army of humble
bees came here to gather honey. In those early dawns of
spring, summer and autumn, when, for some reason not clear
to me now, I was given to rising at dawn, it was canopied by
a wonderful veil of clouds (tinted cirrus and nimbus effects),
which seemed, as I looked at them, too wonderful for words.
Across the fields was a grove of maples concealing a sugar
camp (not ours), where I would go in the early dawn to bring
home a bucket of maple sap. And directly to the north of us
was a large, bare Gethsemane of a field, in the weedy
hollows of which were endless whitening bones, for here
stood a small village slaughter house, the sacrificial altar of
one local butcher. It was not so gruesome as it
sounds--only dramatic.
But this field and the atmosphere of that home! I shall have
to tell you about them or the import of returning there will be
as nothing. It was between my seventh and my tenth year that
we lived there, among the most impressionable of all my
youth. We were very hard pressed, as I understood it later,
but I was too young and too dreamy to feel the pinch of
poverty. This lower Wabash valley is an Egyptian
realm--not very cold in winter, and drowsy with heat in
summer. Corn and wheat and hay and melons grow here in
heavy, plethoric fashion. Rains come infrequently, then only in
deluging storms. The spring comes early, the autumn lingers
until quite New Year's time. In the beech and ash and
hickory groves are many turtle doves. Great hawks and
buzzards and eagles soar high in the air. House and barn
martins circle in covies. The bluejay and scarlet tanager flash
and cry. In the eaves of our cottage were bluebirds and
wrens, and to our trumpet vines and purple clematis came
wondrous humming birds to poise and glitter, tropic in their
radiance. In old Kirkwood's orchard, a quarter of a mile
away over the clover field, I can still hear the guinea fowls
and the peacocks "calling for rain."
Sometimes the experiences of delicious years make a
stained glass window--the rose window of the west--in
the cathedral of our life. These three years in "dirty old
Sullivan," as one of my sisters once called it (with a lip-curl of
contempt thrown in for good measure), form such a flower of
stained glass in mine. They are my rose window. In
symphonies of leaded glass, blue, violet, gold and rose are
the sweet harmonies of memory with all the ills of youth
discarded. A bare-foot boy is sitting astride a high board
fence at dawn. Above him are the tinted fleeces of heaven,
those golden argosies of youthful seas of dream. Over the
blooming clover are scudding the swallows, "my heart
remembers how." I look, and in a fence corner is a spider
web impearled with dew, a great yellow spider somewhere
on its surface is repairing a strand. At a window commanding
the field, a window in the kitchen, is my mother. My brother
Ed has not risen yet, nor my sister Tillie. The boy looks at the
sky. He loves the feel of the dawn. He knows nothing of
whence he is coming or where he is going, only all is
sensuously, deliriously gay and beautiful. Youth is his: the
tingle and response of a new body; the bloom and fragrance
of the clover in the air; the sense of the mystery of flying. He
sits and sings some tuneless tune. Of such is the kingdom of
heaven.
Or it is a great tree, say, a hundred yards from the house.
In its thick leaves and widespreading branches the wind is
stirring. Under its shade Ed and Tillie and I are playing house.
What am I? Oh, a son, a husband, or indeed anything that
the occasion requires. We play at duties--getting breakfast,
or going to work, or coming home. Why? But a turtle dove is
calling somewhere in the depths of a woodland, and that
gives me pause. "Bob white" cries and I think of strange and
faroff things to come. A buzzard is poised in the high blue
above and I wish I might soar on wings as wide.
Or is it a day with a pet dog? Now they are running
side by side over a stubbly field. Now the dog has wandered
away and the boy is calling. Now the boy is sitting in a
rocking chair by a window and holding the dog in his lap,
studying a gnarled tree in the distance, where sits a hawk all
day, meditating no doubt on his midnight crimes. Now the
dog is gone forever, shot somewhere for chasing sheep, and
the boy, disconsolate, is standing under a tree, calling, calling,
calling, until the sadness of his own voice and the futility of
his cries moves him nearly to tears.
These and many scenes like these make my rose
window of the west.