Pinhead sitting quietly over in a corner with his Hallie. They both smiled softly. Pinhead didn’t drink. He wouldn’t. “You let him alone,” Will Albright said to his boys. Pinhead and Hallie got married one Saturday night and there was a big party, everyone howling drunk. Two of the guests wrecked a car trying to get back to town and one of them, Henry Haem . . . a nice young fellow, a clerk in Williamson’s drygoods store . . . you wouldn’t think he’d want to associate with such people . . . he got his arm broke. Will Albright gave Pinhead and Hallie ten acres of land . . . good enough land . . . not too good . . . down by the creek at the foot of a hill and he and the boys built them a house. It wasn’t much of a house but you could live in it if you were hardy enough.
Neither Pinhead nor Hallie was so very hardy.
* * *
They lived. They had children. People said there had been ten of the children. Pinhead and Hallie were getting pretty old. It was after the Albrights were all gone. Pinhead was nearly seventy and Hallie was even older. Women in town said, “How could she ever have had all of those children?
“I’d like to know,” they said.
The children were nearly all gone. Some had died. An officer had descended on the family and four of the children had been carried off to a state institution.
There were left only Pinhead and Hallie and one daughter. They had managed to cling to her and the little strip of land given them by Will Albright, but the house, a mere shed in the beginning, was now in ruins. Every day the three people struck out for town where now, the philosophic lawyer being dead, a new one had taken his place. There will always be at least one such smarty in every town. This one was a tall, slender young man who had inherited money and was fond of race horses.
He was also passionately fond of practical jokes.
The plumber, Burt McHugh, was also gone, but there were new men, Ed Hollman the sheriff, Frank Collins, another young lawyer, Joe Walker, who owned the hotel, and Bob Cairn, who ran the weekly newspaper in Greenhope.
These were the men who with Sol Grey and others had helped organize the baseball team. They went to every game. When the team disbanded they were heartbroken.
And there was Pinhead coming into town followed by Hallie and the one daughter. Mabel was her name. Mabel was tall and gaunt and cross-eyed. She was habitually silent and had an odd habit. Let some man or woman stop on the sidewalk and look steadily at her for a moment and she would begin to cry. When she did it, Pinhead and Hallie both ran to her. She was so tall that they had to stand on tiptoes and reach up, but they both began patting her thin cheeks and her gaunt shoulders. “There, there,” they said. It didn’t turn out so badly. When someone had made Mabel cry, it usually ended by Pinhead collecting a nickel or a dime. He went up to the guilty one and smiled softly. “Give her a little something and she’ll quit,” he said. “She wants a banana.”
He had kept to his plea for bananas. It was the best way to get money. He, Hallie and Mabel always walked into town single-file, Pinhead walking in front . . . although he was old now, he was still very alive . . . then came Hallie . . . her hair hanging down in strings about her pinched face . . . and then Mabel, very tall and in the summer barelegged. Summer or winter she wore the same dress.
It had been black. It had been given her by a widow. There was a little black hat that perched oddly on her head. The dress had been black but it had been patched with cloth of many colors. The colors blended. There was a good deal of discussion of the dress in town. No two people agreed as to its color. Everything depended on the angle at which she approached you.
These people came into town every day to beg. They begged food at the back doors of houses. The town had grown and many new people had come in. Formerly the Perrys came into town along a dirt road, passing town people who, when there had been a shower and the road was not too dusty, were out for a drive in buggies and phaetons, but now the road was paved and they, the Perrys, passed automobiles. It was too bad for the other Perrys. The family was still prosperous and had increased in numbers and standing. None of the other Perrys took their afternoon drives out of town by that road.
* * *
It was the lack of a baseball team. It was because of a dull summer. It was Sol Grey, the man who had the notion of organizing the baseball team, who got the big idea.
He told the others. He told the two young lawyers and Ed Hollman the sheriff. He told Joe Walker the hotel man and Bob Cairn who was editor of the newspaper. He explained. He said that he was standing in front of a store.
“I was in front of Herd’s grocery,” he said. He had just been standing there when the three Perrys had come along. He thought that Pinhead had intended to ask him for a nickel or a dime. Anyway Pinhead had stopped before Sol and then Hallie and Mabel had stopped. Sol thought he must have been thinking of something else. Perhaps he was trying to think of some new way to break the monotony of life in Greenhope that summer. He found himself staring hard and long, not at Mabel but at Hallie Perry.
He did it unconsciously like that and didn’t know how long he had kept it up, but suddenly there had come a queer change over Pinhead.
“Why, you all know Pinhead,” Sol said. The men were all gathered that day before Doc Foreman’s drugstore. Sol kept bending over and slapping his knees with his hands as he told of what had happened. He had been staring at Hallie that way, not thinking of what he was doing, and Pinhead had got suddenly and furiously jealous.
Pinhead had no doubt intended to ask Sol for a nickel or a dime to buy bananas. Up to that moment no one in town had ever seen Pinhead angry.
“Well, did he get sore,” Sol Grey cried. He shook with laughter. Pinhead had begun to berate him. “You let my woman alone!
“What do you mean staring at my woman?
“I won’t have any man fooling with my woman.”
It was pretty rich. Pinhead had got the idea into his head that Sol . . . he was a lumber and coal dealer . . . a man who took pride in his clothes . . . a married man . . . the crazy loon had thought Sol was trying to make up to Pinhead’s wife.
It was something gaudy. It was something to talk and to laugh about. It was something to work on. Sol said that Pinhead had offered to fight him. “My God,” cried Joe Walker. Pinhead Perry was past seventy by that time and there was Hallie with her lame foot and her goiter—
And all three of the Perrys so hopelessly dirty.
“My God! Oh my Lord! He thinks she’s beautiful,” Joe Walker cried.
“Swell,” said Bob Cairn. The newspaper man, who was always looking for ideas, had one at once.
It sure had innumerable funny angles and all the men went to work. They began stopping Pinhead on the street. He would be coming along followed by the two women, but the man who had stopped the little procession would draw Pinhead aside. “It’s like this,” he’d say. He’d declare he hated to bring the matter up but he thought he should. “A man’s a man,” he’d say. “He can’t have other men fooling around with his woman.” It was so much fun to see the serious, baffled, hurt look in Pinhead’s eyes.
There would be dark hints cast out.
The man who had taken Pinhead aside spoke of an evening, a night in fact, of the past. He said he had been out at night and had come into town past Pinhead’s house. There was no road out that way and Pinhead and his two women, when they made their daily trip into town, had to follow a cow path along Albright Creek to get into the main road, but the man did not bother to take that into account.
“I was going along the road past your house.”
There had been various men of the town seen creeping away from the house at night.
No doubt Pinhead was asleep. Certain very respectable men of the town were named. There was Hal Pawsey. He kept the jewelry store in Greenhope and was a very shy modest man. Pinhead rushed into his store and began to shout. There was a woman, the wife of the Baptist minister, in the store at that time. She was seeing about getting her watch fixed. Hallie and Mabel were outsid
e on the sidewalk and they were both crying. Pinhead began beating with his fists on the glass showcase in the store. He broke the case. He used such language that he frightened the Baptist minister’s wife so that she ran out of the store.
That was one incident of the summer but there were many others. The hotel man, the newspaper man, the lawyer, Sol Grey, and several others kept busily at work.
They got Pinhead to tackle a stranger in town, a traveling man, coming out of a store with bags in his hand, and Pinhead got arrested and had to serve a term in jail. It was the first time he’d ever been in jail.
Then when he was let out, they began again. It was swell. It was great fun. There was a story going around town that Pinhead had begun to beat his wife and that she took it stoically. Someone had seen him doing it on the road into town. They said she just stood and took it and didn’t cry much.
The men kept it going. It was a dull summer. One evening, when the moon was shining and the corn was getting knee-high, several of the men went in a car out to Pinhead’s house. They left the car in the road and crept through bushes until they got quite near to the house. One of them had given Pinhead some money and had advised him to spend it to buy a bag of flour. The men in the bushes could see into the open door of the shack. “My God,” said Joe Walker. “Look!” he said. “He’s got her tied to a chair.
“Ain’t that rich?” he said.
Pinhead had Hallie sitting in the one chair of the one-roomed house . . . the roof was almost gone and when it rained the water poured in . . . and he was tying her to the chair with a piece of rope. Someone of the men had told Pinhead that another man of the town had planned to visit the house that night.
The men from town lay in the bushes watching. The tall daughter Mabel was on the porch outside and she was crying. Pinhead, having got his wife tied to the chair, began to scatter flour on the floor of the room and on the porch outside. He backed away from Hallie, scattering the flour, and she was crying. When he had got to the door and as he was backing across the narrow rickety front porch, he scattered the flour thickly. The idea was that if any one of Hallie’s lovers came, he’d leave his footprints in the flour.
He came out into a little yard at the front and got under a bush. He sat on the ground under the bush. In the moonlight the men from town could see him quite plainly. They said afterwards that he also began to cry. For some reason, even to the men of Greenhope, who were trying as best they could to get through a dull summer, the scene from the bushes before Pinhead’s house that night wasn’t funny. When they had crept out from under the bushes and had got back to their car and into town, one of them went to the drugstore and told the story, but nobody laughed.
A Landed Proprietor
* * *
WHEN I was a very young boy, one of several sons in a very poor family in an American middle western town, I was, for a time, the town newsboy and among my customers in the town, to whom I delivered daily the newspaper from our nearest big city, was a certain little old woman.
She, as I was later to find out, was also very poor. She must however have had a small income from some source unknown to us but her life in her house was a very lonely one. It was a narrow penny counting life. She was there, living alone in a little frame house, on a street of small houses, and beside her house was a vacant lot in which grew several gnarled old apple trees. Her own house was always very clean, very neatly kept but, during the winter months, she sat all day in her kitchen. She did it to save fuel. She heated only the one room in her house.
Such old women are often very wonderful. They grow old patiently, with quiet serenity, often a strange beauty in their wrinkled old faces. They attain a beauty that seldom comes to old men. Such an old woman may carry about a worn out body, may walk with difficulty, her body may be wracked with pain but a beautiful aliveness still shines out of her old eyes and it may be because women are less defeated by modern life. I have often thought that. They have been creators. Children have been born out of their bodies. There may be in them a feeling of accomplishment we men seldom get.
“See, I have done it. Now I am old and tired but there are these others, men and women, the seeds of whom I have carried in my body. They have gone away from me now but they are alive, somewhere in the world. Here I am. I have not just lived, I have given out life.”
* * *
The particular old woman of whom I speak used to call me often into her house. On cold or rainy days she stood at her kitchen door waiting for my coming. She took an evening paper and at night, sometimes, the train from the city was late. She put a lamp in her kitchen window. She called to me.
“Come in, boy. Dry yourself a little. Warm yourself by my fire.” She had baked a pie or had made cookies and she gave me some. She was quite small and, as I stood by her kitchen stove, she came and put a thin old arm about my shoulders. “It is good to be young, to have your life before you,” she said. She smiled at me and lights danced in her old eyes. “I am sure you will be a fine man. I feel it. I am sure of it,” she added and I drank in her words. When I left her house on winter nights I found myself running joyously along through the dark night streets of our little town and when I put my hand into my coat pocket I found that, while her arm was about my shoulder, she had slipped several more cookies into my pocket.
She died and she had put my name into her will. How proud I was. She had left her house and its furnishings to a son, a mechanic living in some distant city, but the vacant lot, beside her house, in which grew the gnarled old apple trees, she had left to me.
It was a gesture. It was because my daily visits to her house had broken her loneliness. It was because, after she was gone, she wanted me to remember and think of her. It was, to me, a matter of magnificent importance. There was this will, to be probated in our court. I had got the word “probated” from a lawyer of the town to whom I also delivered a daily newspaper. My name would be read out. I would be called upon to sign a paper. I walked about the streets with my chest thrown out.
And there was something else. I had become a land owner, a landed proprietor. I took some of my boy friends to see my lot. There was a particular boy, the son of a grocer. “You see, Herman, your father may own a store but what do you own?” It was fall and there were a few small gnarled apples on the old apple trees and scattered about among tall weeds. I grew generous. “Help yourself, Herman. Put some in your pocket. It’s all right with me.” I filled my own pockets and took my apples home, demanding that mother make me a pie, and, when it was made, I stood over it, handing out small wedges to my brothers and sisters. This was not a family affair. It was my pie, made from the apples of my own trees that grew on my own land. How gloriously generous I had become. To be thus generous with my own property was a new and sweet feeling to me.
I took my brothers with me to see my lot but they were scornful. “Ah, it is nothing,” one of them said. “Such old, no-good trees.
“And look, at the back there, where it goes down to the creek. It is all wet back there. It is a swamp.”
It was something I could not stand. One of my brothers and I fought. We stood under one of my apple trees and I pummelled him while a still younger brother, little more than a babe, stood on the sidewalk before my lot and cried.
It was better with my sister who was two years older than myself and, I thought, a very sensible person. She had understanding. She praised my lot. “What fine trees,” she said. “Look, the ground must be very rich. How tall the weeds have grown.”
In our family we had always been moving. We went from one small frame house in the town to another. There were six of us and no two of us had been born in the same house. Perhaps we moved whenever the rent became too much overdue. I can’t be sure of that.
But now I had got this piece of land and, presently, I would build a house on it, such a magnificent house. What a joy it would be to our mother. My sister and I spent hours, walking up and down through tall weeds, making our plans. “You just wait, sister. You’ll s
ee. I shall grow rich.” In a town some fifty miles away oil had recently been struck. “Who knows? There may be oil down here, under this very spot on which I stand.”
In a stationery store of the town I had bought a magazine devoted to house plans and I took it home. To avoid my brothers, who continued scornful (“It is just pure jealousy,” I told my sister), my sister and I went upstairs into a bedroom of our house. We sat on the edge of the bed.
What plans we made. Our house continued to grow and grow. Every day we added more rooms. My sister, from time to time, began to feel, I thought, too much a co-owner and I had to rebuke her a little. It was all right for her to make suggestions but all decisions were to be left to me. I made that quite clear to her.
And then it happened. The dream faded. It blew up.
It was the same small town lawyer who had given me the word “probate” who blew it up.
“You look here, kid,” he one day said to me, “about that lot that old woman left you.
“I’ve been looking it up,” he said. He explained to me that the unpaid taxes on my lot amounted to about four times what it was worth.
“I guess you don’t want to prove up on it,” he said but I could not answer him. I ran away. He had his office upstairs over a shoe store in our town and I ran quickly down the stairs and through an alleyway back of stores and along residence streets until I got out into the country.
It was in the spring, on a morning in the spring, when the lawyer gave me the dreadful news and I had my morning papers to distribute but, on that morning, I did not finish delivering the papers. At the edge of town I threw them angrily into a creek. I ran into a wood.
But who can understand the sadness of a boy? I was there in that wood, not far from our town. For a time I cried and then I grew angry. So there was a thing called “taxes.” You had a vacant lot given you, a fine lot, I thought, with grand trees growing on it. You had it and then you had it not. Some mysterious force you didn’t understand reached down and took it away from you. You had to pay these taxes. But where would you get the money for that?