but in his mother’s words telling about longago, in his father’s telling about when I was a boy, in the kidding stories of uncles, in the lies the kids told at school, the hired man’s yarns, the tall tales the doughboys told after taps;
it was speech that clung to the ears, the link that tingled in the blood; U. S. A.
U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U. S. A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people.
Newsreel I
It was that emancipated race
That was chargin up the hill
Up to where them insurrectos
Was afightin fit to kill
CAPITAL CITY’S CENTURY CLOSED
General Miles with his gaudy uniform and spirited charger was the center for all eyes especially as his steed was extremely restless. Just as the band passed the Commanding General his horse stood upon his hind legs and was almost erect. General Miles instantly reined in the frightened animal and dug in his spurs in an endeavor to control the horse which to the horror of the spectators, fell over backwards and landed squarely on the Commanding General. Much to the gratification of the people General Miles was not injured but considerable skin was scraped off the flank of the horse. Almost every inch of General Miles’s overcoat was covered with the dust of the street and between the shoulders a hole about an inch in diameter was punctured. Without waiting for anyone to brush the dust from his garments General Miles remounted his horse and reviewed the parade as if it were an everyday occurrence.
The incident naturally attracted the attention of the crowd, and this brought to notice the fact that the Commanding General never permits a flag to be carried past him without uncovering and remaining so until the colors have passed
And the Captain bold of Company B
Was afightin in the lead
Just like a trueborn soldier he
Of them bullets took no heed
OFFICIALS KNOW NOTHING OF VICE
Sanitary trustees turn water of Chicago River into drainage canal LAKE MICHIGAN SHAKES HANDS WITH THE FATHER OF THE WATERS German zuchterverein singing contest for canarybirds opens the fight for bimetallism at the ratio of 16 to 1 has not been lost says Bryan
BRITISH BEATEN AT MAFEKING
For there’s many a man been murdered in Luzon
CLAIMS ISLANDS FOR ALL TIME
Hamilton Club Listens to Oratory by Ex-Congressman Posey of Indiana
NOISE GREETS NEW CENTURY
LABOR GREETS NEW CENTURY
CHURCHES GREET NEW CENTURY
Mr. McKinley is hard at work in his office when the new year begins.
NATION GREETS CENTURY’S DAWN
Responding to a toast, Hail Columbia! at the Columbia Club banquet in Indianapolis, Ind., ex-President Benjamin Harrison said in part: I have no argument to make here or anywhere against territorial expansion; but I do not, as some do, look upon territorial expansion as the safest and most attractive avenue of national development. By the advantages of abundant and cheap coal and iron, of an enormous overproduction of food products and of invention and economy in production, we are now leading by the nose the original and the greatest of the colonizing nations.
Society Girls Shocked: Danced with Detectives
For there’s many a man been murdered in Luzon
and Mindanao
GAIETY GIRLS MOBBED IN NEW JERSEY
One of the lithographs of the leading lady represented her in less than Atlantic City bathing costume, sitting on a red-hot stove; in one hand she held a brimming glass of wine, in the other ribbons drawn over a pair of rampant lobsters.
For there’s many a man been murdered in Luzon
and Mindanao
and in Samar
In responding to the toast, “The Twentieth Century,” Senator Albert J. Beveridge said in part: The twentieth century will be American. American thought will dominate it. American progress will give it color and direction. American deeds will make it illustrious.
Civilization will never lose its hold on Shanghai. Civilization will never depart from Hongkong. The gates of Peking will never again be closed to the methods of modern man. The regeneration of the world, physical as well as moral, has begun, and revolutions never move backwards.
There’s been many a good man murdered in the Philippines
Lies sleeping in some lonesome grave.
The Camera Eye (1)
when you walk along the street you have to step carefully always on the cobbles so as not to step on the bright anxious grassblades easier if you hold Mother’s hand and hang on it that way you can kick up your toes but walking fast you have to tread on too many grassblades the poor hurt green tongues shrink under your feet maybe thats why those people are so angry and follow us shaking their fists they’re throwing stones grownup people throwing stones She’s walking fast and we’re running her pointed toes sticking out sharp among the poor trodden grassblades under the shaking folds of the brown cloth dress Englander a pebble tinkles along the cobbles
Quick darling quick in the postcard shop its quiet the angry people are outside and cant come in non nein nicht englander amerikanisch americain Hoch Amerika Vive l’Amerique She laughs My dear they had me right frightened
war on the veldt Kruger Bloemfontein Ladysmith and Queen Victoria an old lady in a pointed lace cap sent chocolate to the soldiers at Christmas
under the counter it’s dark and the lady the nice Dutch lady who loves Americans and has relations in Trenton shows you postcards that shine in the dark pretty hotels and palaces O que c’est beau schon prittie prittie and the moonlight ripple ripple under a bridge and the little reverbères are alight in the dark under the counter and the little windows of hotels around the harbor O que c’est beau la lune
and the big moon
Mac
When the wind set from the silver factories across the river the air of the gray fourfamily frame house where Fainy McCreary was born was choking all day with the smell of whaleoil soap. Other days it smelt of cabbage and babies and Mrs. McCreary’s washboilers. Fainy could never play at home because Pop, a lame cavechested man with a wispy blonde-gray mustache, was nightwatchman at the Chadwick Mills and slept all day. It was only round five o’clock that a curling whiff of tobacco smoke would seep through from the front room into the kitchen. That was a sign that Pop was up and in good spirits, and would soon be wanting his supper.
Then Fainy would be sent running out to one of two corners of the short muddy street of identical frame houses where they lived.
To the right it was half a block to Finley’s where he would have to wait at the bar in a forest of mudsplattered trouserlegs until all the rank brawling mouths of grownups had been stopped with beers and whiskeys. Then he would walk home, making each step very carefully, with the handle of the pail of suds cutting into his hand.
To the left it was half a block to Maginnis’s Fancy Groceries, Home and Imported Products. Fainy liked the cardboard Cream of Wheat darkey in the window, the glass case with different kinds of salami in it, the barrels of potatoes and cabbages, the brown smell of sugar, sawdust, ginger, kippered herring, ham, vinegar, bread, pepper, lard.
“A loaf of bread, please, mister, a half pound of butter and a box of ginger snaps.”
Some evenings, when Mom felt poorly, Fainy had to go further; round the corner past Maginnis’s, down Riverside Avenue where the trolley ran, and across the red bridge over th
e little river that flowed black between icy undercut snowbanks in winter, yellow and spuming in the spring thaws, brown and oily in summer. Across the river all the way to the corner of Riverside and Main, where the drugstore was, lived Bohunks and Polaks. Their kids were always fighting with the kids of the Murphys and O’Haras and O’Flanagans who lived on Orchard Street.
Fainy would walk along with his knees quaking, the medicine bottle in its white paper tight in one mittened hand. At the corner of Quince was a group of boys he’d have to pass. Passing wasn’t so bad; it was when he was about twenty yards from them that the first snowball would hum by his ear. There was no comeback. If he broke into a run, they’d chase him. If he dropped the medicine bottle he’d be beaten up when he got home. A soft one would plunk on the back of his head and the snow began to trickle down his neck. When he was a half a block from the bridge he’d take a chance and run for it.
“Scared cat . . . Shanty Irish . . . Bowlegged Murphy . . . Running home to tell the cop” . . . would yell the Polak and Bohunk kids between snowballs. They made their snowballs hard by pouring water on them and leaving them to freeze overnight; if one of those hit him it drew blood.
The backyard was the only place you could really feel safe to play in. There were brokendown fences, dented garbage cans, old pots and pans too nearly sieves to mend, a vacant chickencoop that still had feathers and droppings on the floor, hogweed in summer, mud in winter; but the glory of the McCrearys’ backyard was Tony Harriman’s rabbit hutch, where he kept Belgian hares. Tony Harriman was a consumptive and lived with his mother on the ground floor left. He wanted to raise all sorts of other small animals too, raccoons, otter, even silver fox, he’d get rich that way. The day he died nobody could find the key to the big padlock on the door of the rabbit hutch. Fainy fed the hares for several days by pushing in cabbage and lettuce leaves through the double thickness of chickenwire. Then came a week of sleet and rain when he didn’t go out in the yard. The first fine day, when he went to look, one of the hares was dead. Fainy turned white; he tried to tell himself the hare was asleep, but it lay gawkily stiff, not asleep. The other hares were huddled in a corner looking about with twitching noses, their big ears flopping helpless over their backs. Poor hares; Fainy wanted to cry. He ran upstairs to his mother’s kitchen, ducked under the ironing board and got the hammer out of the drawer in the kitchen table. The first time he tried he mashed his finger, but the second time he managed to jump the padlock. Inside the cage there was a funny, sour smell. Fainy picked the dead hare up by its ears. Its soft white belly was beginning to puff up, one dead eye was scaringly open. Something suddenly got hold of Fainy and made him drop the hare in the nearest garbage can and run upstairs. Still cold and trembling, he tiptoed out onto the back porch and looked down. Breathlessly he watched the other hares. By cautious hops they were getting near the door of the hutch into the yard. One of them was out. It sat up on its hind legs, limp ears suddenly stiff. Mom called him to bring her a flatiron from the stove. When he got back to the porch the hares were all gone.
That winter there was a strike in the Chadwick Mills and Pop lost his job. He would sit all day in the front room smoking and cursing:
“Ablebodied man by Jesus, if I couldn’t lick any one of those damn Polaks with my crutch tied behind my back . . . I says so to Mr. Barry; I ain’t goin’ to join no strike. Mr. Barry, a sensible quiet man, a bit of an invalid, with a wife an’ kiddies to think for. Eight years I’ve been watchman, an’ now you give me the sack to take on a bunch of thugs from a detective agency. The dirty pugnosed son of a bitch.”
“If those damn lousy furreners hadn’t a walked out,” somebody would answer soothingly.
The strike was not popular on Orchard Street. It meant that Mom had to work harder and harder, doing bigger and bigger boilersful of wash, and that Fainy and his older sister Milly had to help when they came home from school. And then one day Mom got sick and had to go back to bed instead of starting in on the ironing, and lay with her round white creased face whiter than the pillow and her watercreased hands in a knot under her chin. The doctor came and the district nurse, and all three rooms of the flat smelt of doctors and nurses and drugs, and the only place Fainy and Milly could find to sit was on the stairs. There they sat and cried quietly together. Then Mom’s face on the pillow shrank into a little creased white thing like a rumpled up handkerchief and they said that she was dead and took her away.
The funeral was from the undertaking parlors on Riverside Avenue on the next block. Fainy felt very proud and important because everybody kissed him and patted his head and said he was behaving like a little man. He had a new black suit on, too, like a grownup suit with pockets and everything, except that it had short pants. There were all sorts of people at the undertaking parlors he had never been close to before, Mr. Russell, the butcher and Father O’Donnell and Uncle Tim O’Hara who’d come on from Chicago, and it smelt of whisky and beer like at Finley’s. Uncle Tim was a skinny man with a knobbed red face and blurry blue eyes. He wore a loose black silk tie that worried Fainy, and kept leaning down suddenly, bending from the waist as if he was going to close up like a jackknife, and whispering in a thick voice in Fainy’s ear.
“Don’t you mind ’em, old sport, they’re a bunch o’ bums and hypocrytes, stewed to the ears most of ’em already. Look at Father O’Donnell the fat swine already figurin’ up the burial fees. But don’t you mind ’em remember you’re an O’Hara on your mother’s side. I don’t mind ’em, old sport, and she was my own sister by birth and blood.”
When they got home he was terribly sleepy and his feet were cold and wet. Nobody paid any attention to him. He sat whimpering on the edge of the bed in the dark. In the front room there were voices and a sound of knives and forks, but he didn’t dare go in there. He curled up against the wall and went to sleep. Light in his eyes woke him up. Uncle Tim and Pop were standing over him talking loud. They looked funny and didn’t seem to be standing very steady. Uncle Tim held the lamp.
“Well, Fainy, old sport,” said Uncle Tim giving the lamp a perilous wave over Fainy’s head. “Fenian O’Hara McCreary, sit up and take notice and tell us what you think of our proposed removal to the great and growing city of Chicago. Middletown’s a terrible bitch of a dump if you ask me . . . Meanin’ no offense, John . . . But Chicago . . . Jesus God, man, when you get there you’ll think you’ve been dead and nailed up in a coffin all these years.”
Fainy was scared. He drew his knees up to his chin and looked tremblingly at the two big swaying figures of men lit by the swaying lamp. He tried to speak but the words dried up on his lips.
“The kid’s asleep, Tim, for all your speechifyin’. . . Take your clothes off, Fainy, and get into bed and get a good night’s sleep. We’re leavin’ in the mornin’.”
And late on a rainy morning, without any breakfast, with a big old swelltop trunk tied up with rope joggling perilously on the roof of the cab that Fainy had been sent to order from Hodgeson’s Livery Stable, they set out. Milly was crying. Pop didn’t say a word but sucked on an unlit pipe. Uncle Tim handled everything, making little jokes all the time that nobody laughed at, pulling a roll of bills out of his pocket at every juncture, or taking great gurgling sips out of the flask he had in his pocket. Milly cried and cried. Fainy looked out with big dry eyes at the familiar streets, all suddenly odd and lopsided, that rolled past the cab; the red bridge, the scabshingled houses where the Polaks lived, Smith’s and Smith’s corner drugstore . . . there was Billy Hogan just coming out with a package of chewing gum in his hand. Playing hookey again. Fainy had an impulse to yell at him, but something froze it . . . Main with its elms and street cars, blocks of stores round the corner of Church, and then the fire department. Fainy looked for the last time into the dark cave where shone entrancingly the brass and copper curves of the engine, then past the cardboard fronts of the First Congregational Church, The Carmel Baptist Church, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church built of brick and set catercornered on its l
ot instead of straight with a stern face to the street like the other churches, then the three castiron stags on the lawn in front of the Commercial House, and the residences, each with its lawn, each with its scrollsaw porch, each with its hydrangea bush. Then the houses got smaller, and the lawns disappeared; the cab trundled round past Simpson’s Grain and Feed Warehouse, along a row of barbershops, saloons and lunchrooms, and they were all getting out at the station.
At the station lunchcounter Uncle Tim set everybody up to breakfast. He dried Milly’s tears and blew Fainy’s nose in a big new pockethandkerchief that still had the tag on the corner and set them to work on bacon and eggs and coffee. Fainy hadn’t had coffee before, so the idea of sitting up like a man and drinking coffee made him feel pretty good. Milly didn’t like hers, said it was bitter. They were left all alone in the lunchroom for some time with the empty plates and empty coffee cups under the beady eyes of a woman with the long neck and pointed face of a hen who looked at them disapprovingly from behind the counter. Then with an enormous, shattering rumble, sludgepuff sludge . . . puff, the train came into the station. They were scooped up and dragged across the platform and through a pipesmoky car and before they knew it the train was moving and the wintry russet Connecticut landscape was clattering by.