“Where is she?” I asked.
“At the house. And she wants you to go right over and help.”
“Help what?”
“Help pack up and move. The Gibbses’ things are out and your Mother thinks we can get the beds moved, and the cook-stove, this afternoon, and sleep in a warm house tonight. So you run along. I can’t leave. I’m no good at that sort of thing anyway.”
I had known for two weeks, rather vaguely, that we might move, but nothing was really settled. And I was too busy with my own affairs to pay much attention to supper-table talk. But I did know there was this five-room house over on the west side of town that was called “the Gibbs house” because it was occupied by the Reverend George P. Gibbs and his wife, who also was an ordained preacher. One of them, or maybe both, had been in charge of the Congregational church in Flagler until a few weeks ago. Then they took a leave of absence and went over in the western part of the state to visit other churches. A few days ago they came back and formally resigned the Flagler pulpit to accept a call to a church in Creede, Colorado, and they said they were moving to Creede “in the near future.”
The Lavington bank owned the house, and two weeks earlier, while the Gibbses were away, Mother somehow got a promise from the bank that she could rent the Gibbs house as soon as it was vacated. And somehow Mother persuaded Mrs. Gibbs, before she and Mr. Gibbs went back on the Friday train to Denver, to pack her belongings and leave orders for her furniture to be shipped to Creede. This morning Mother got hold of Mr. Groves, the drayman, and had him move the Gibbses’ furniture and trunks down to the depot to wait for the westbound freight in the middle of next week. Then she went to Mr. Price, the cashier at the bank, informed him that the house was empty, paid a month’s rent, and had swept out the whole house before she went back to the News office. By eleven this morning she had everything arranged.
When I got to the boxcar house where we had lived for six months, Mother was out back. She had a dish towel tied around her head, cotton flannel work gloves on her hands, and one of Father’s out-at-elbows suit coats around her, and she was rattling a broomstick in a section of black tin stovepipe, creating a cloud of soot that streamed away like smoke from a laboring locomotive. She shouted, “Bring out the rest of the stovepipe from the kitchen! And don’t spill soot all over the floor!”
In the next hour we took down all the pipe from both stoves, packed the bedding in our two storage trunks, folded the window curtains, and were packing dishes in two big boxes when Mr. Groves arrived with the dray. Mother supervised while he and I loaded the cookstove, the two beds, the trunks of bedding, the boxes of dishes, and a big hot kettle that Mother said was our supper.
The sleet had turned to fine snow, but Mr. Groves had an old canvas tarp to put over the load and keep the mattresses dry. He helped Mother up onto the seat, climbed up beside her, I got on the back, and off we went, across town. The road was slick, the horses slithered, and I heard Mr. Groves shout to Mother, “I don’t see why you always do things to the weather! Remember the night you got here?”
“I certainly do,” Mother shouted back. “You got the best rain you’d had in months!”
Mr. Groves laughed. “Well, I suppose you could say this is the best snowstorm we’ve had in months, too.”
We pulled up at the Gibbs house and began unloading. When we had everything inside Mr. Groves asked, “Can I help set up the stoves and the beds?”
“We can do that,” Mother said. “I’d a lot rather you went back and brought the rest of the furniture before the storm really settles down. By tomorrow it may be too bad to try to move anything.”
“How about your chickens?”
“They’re all right. I fed and watered them. We can’t move them anyway till we get a pen built over here.”
Mr. Groves went back for the rest of the furniture, and Mother and I set up the cookstove in the kitchen and I went out to the woodshed for kindling. There was a fresh ton of coal out there. “I ordered it this morning,” Mother said. She hadn’t forgotten a thing. I got a fire going and Mother put a pail of water to heat, and we got washed up and set up the bedsteads in the two bedrooms, put the springs and mattresses on them, while the fire began to take the chill off the house. By then Mr. Groves was back with the rest of the furniture, which we put in the front room to sort out later. Before he left, Mr. Groves helped me set up the heating stove in the front room, and with the two fires going the house really began to warm up. By five o’clock, when it was so dark we had to light the oil lamps, the place was warmer than the boxcar house ever had been.
Mother had the beds made and the table set when Father came home at six o’clock. He came in and looked around and said, “I don’t know whose house I wandered into, but I sure like it here.” He kissed Mother and put his coat and hat on a chair in the front room and came back into the kitchen. Mother had washed her face, brushed her hair, and put on a fresh clean apron. Fritz was lying on his old rug in a warm place beside the chimney. The teakettle was singing softly on the back of the stove, and a big pot of stewed chicken and dumplings simmered and filled the kitchen with a special savor. Somehow, along with everything else, Mother had put a hen to stew that morning and brought it along, in that first load of furniture, still warm in the pot. She had made the dumplings and put them in only a few minutes before Father got home.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Father said, “but you sure make moving look easy.”
“There’s nothing to it,” Mother said, “as long as you stay out of the way. You can help with those things in the front room tomorrow, but right now you can wash your hands and sit down at the table.”
Not until we were at the table did I remember that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I was starved. I finished a big first helping and was on a second before I paused long enough to tell them that Spider was sick. Father, whose stomach had been “touchy” ever since he almost died of typhoid fever, and who thought any sickness must be a digestive disorder, said, “Probably something he ate.” But Mother said, “Stanley’s not robust. That is his name, isn’t it, Stanley? He has asthma, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he has weak lungs. He shouldn’t have gone with you and Justin today.”
“It was all right when we left.”
“Yes, I guess it was. It didn’t turn stormy till right after dinnertime. Was it still snowing when you came home, Will?”
“It had almost stopped. About an inch on the ground. But it’s getting a lot colder.” Father heaved a deep sigh. “You know something? This is the first time this winter that my feet have been warm at home. That shack we were living in—” He shook his head. “Maybe I ought to send a letter of thanks to that congregation over in Creede.”
“If you want to,” Mother said. “But you can thank me, too. Three other people were waiting to see Mr. Price about renting this house when I came out of his office this morning.”
The snow stopped during the night, but the temperature dropped to zero and a bitter wind was blowing by the next morning. Father and I went over to the old place to feed and water the chickens, and we didn’t see another person outdoors. We went right back to the new house and spent the rest of the day happily indoors, getting the carpets down and the furniture arranged the way Mother wanted it.
It wasn’t until Monday, at school, that I saw Little Doc and had any word about Spider. “He’s got an awful heavy cold and he’s running a fever,” Little Doc said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means he’s pretty sick.”
“Has your father seen him?”
“He’s been up there twice.”
Tuesday brought no change, but at least Little Doc didn’t say he was any worse. “My father says he’s about the same.”
But Wednesday morning Little Doc said, “He’s got pneumonia.” Even Little Doc said the word in a hushed voice. Pneumonia, in that climate and those days, was so deadly that everyone hesitated to talk about it. It was the dread consequence of a h
eavy cold, and those with “weak lungs” or asthma were always susceptible to chest colds. Those who recovered from pneumonia were considered lucky to be alive. My mother had it when she was fourteen years old, and she almost died. Her stories about it were so grim that she seldom told them, never when I had even a slight cold.
I was so stunned at Little Doc’s news that I went to the wrong room for botany class and didn’t realize where I was until the teacher began talking about Hamlet’s soliloquy. I left and went to the right room, but even there I heard hardly a word. I went through my other classes in a kind of daze, and after my last class I found Little Doc and said, “We’ve got to go up and see Spider.”
“No,” Little Doc said. “I asked my father at noon, and he said we’d better stay away. He said Spider’s got an awful high fever and is out of his head.”
“Well, there’s got to be something we can do!”
“Come on down to the store and we’ll see what Dad says.”
Dr. Williams wasn’t there, but he came in only a few minutes later, looking tired out, red-eyed and haggard. He had been called out at midnight, to a farm fifteen miles up north, to deliver a baby, which was born dead. He’d just got back when he got a call from out west of town where a man had what turned out to be a ruptured appendix. He operated, on a kitchen table, and hoped for the best. Now he had just been up in the north end of town seeing an old lady who had a gallstone attack, and he had gone over to the Miners’ for the second time that day before he returned to the drug store. He saw the two of us waiting and said, “Come on back to the office.”
We went, and he put down his bag, took off his overcoat, and sat down heavily in the swivel chair at his rolltop desk. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then turned his back to the desk, began polishing his glasses with his handkerchief, and without looking up said, “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news about Stanley. His heart can’t take the strain much longer. He may not pull through the night.”
I felt as though a horse had kicked me right in the pit of the stomach. The room began to swim and I reached for a chair and almost fell into it. Little Doc just stood there, staring at his father, but I saw his hands clench into fists, then slowly relax.
Dr. Williams put his handkerchief away and put his glasses on again. He sighed, then said, “He’s got double pneumonia, and a bad heart on top of that—” He shook his head. “He happens to be one of those youngsters who live right on the ragged edge, and it doesn’t take much to push them over. A weakness in the lungs and the heart, and no reserve.” He paused a moment, then turned to me. “I tried to tell Justin, and I want to tell you, that that hunting trip you three took last Saturday didn’t have anything to do with this. He had pneumonia before he ever left the house. If he’d stayed home, in bed, he’d have been just as sick by now! Just remember that, both of you.”
“Can we go see him?” I asked.
“No. There’s no need for you to be exposed, in the first place. And Stanley is delirious. He wouldn’t even know you.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do?”
Dr. Williams shook his head. “Just see that you don’t get pneumonia. Though you’re both pretty healthy specimens…. No, there’s nothing you can do for Stanley.” And he turned to his desk.
Little Doc and I went out and stood at the big front window, saying nothing for several minutes. Finally I said, “See you in the morning,” and went out and around the corner and down to the News office.
I told Father what Dr. Williams had said, and he shook his head. “How old is he? Same age you are, isn’t he, fifteen?” I said yes. “Too bad. Just too bad. Makes you wonder what it’s all about. Some folks outlive any need for them, and others never really get started. And we don’t know why. The preachers say it’s God’s will, and maybe they’re right. But it’s a peculiar way to run things, if I do say so.”
Spider died that night.
The funeral was set for Saturday. Little Doc and I agreed that we weren’t going to the funeral. We weren’t going to go and watch people cry, and probably cry ourselves, and look at a dead body in a coffin that wouldn’t be Spider at all, but just what was left when Stanley Miner died. If we looked in the coffin we would cry, and if we sat there in the church remembering Spider we would think of him the way he was and begin to laugh. We wanted none of the funeral.
When I announced this at home, Mother said, “You can’t refuse to go, son. You can’t! He was one of your very best friends. What will his family think?”
But Father said, “I don’t see why he has to go. If he and Justin feel that way, I think Stanley would say they didn’t have to go.”
“That’s—that’s practically irreligious, Will!”
“Nothing of the kind.” Father turned to me. “What do you want to do instead, if you don’t go to the funeral?”
“Well, we might go out to Verhoff’s Dam, or somewhere. Maybe go hunting jacks.”
“Go hunting?” Mother was aghast. “During the funeral?”
“Sarah,” Father said, “funerals are for family and old folks, like us. I never did think youngsters should be there. Or even fifteen-year-olds. You and I will go to the funeral. You don’t have to go, son. You can do whatever you want to.”
I don’t know what was said to Little Doc. We never talked about it, he and I. I didn’t tell him what my folks said. But at two o’clock Saturday afternoon, when they were holding the funeral at the church in Flagler, we were out at Verhoff’s Dam. It was a mild day, the snow had all melted, the sun was shining brightly, and we were sitting on the hillside looking down at the sheet of ice on the water above the dam. We weren’t talking. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. But finally Little Doc turned to me and said, “They must be at the cemetery by now,” and I said yes, and we stood up and fired two shots apiece out across the frozen pond. I don’t know why, but that’s what we did without even planning it.
Then we went back to town, slowly, taking our time. We put up several jack rabbits but didn’t fire a shot at them. We didn’t even talk until we were almost there. Then Little Doc said, trying to make it offhand, “I’ve decided I’m going to study medicine.” And somehow that brought a big lump in my throat and for the first time all afternoon there were tears in my eyes. Then Little Doc was muttering softly under his breath. And we both sniffled and wiped our eyes and got it over with. Then we went on into town. It was early dusk, and lights were going on in the houses we passed. We went up the side street to the corner where he went north to his house and I went west to mine, and we said, “So long,” just as though it was any Saturday in the year, and we went on home.
11
EVEN WITH STATISTICS IT sometimes is hard to gauge the effects of economic ups and downs. Without them it is sheer guesswork, particularly when human reactions are concerned. And even statistics couldn’t have accounted for two qualities that, broadly speaking, marked the character of the people of that time and place: pioneer doggedness and frontier optimism. The pioneer went there determined to stay, in spite of the odds. And the frontiersman, early or late, expected life to be better than it was where he came from.
In any case, there were no statistics about the hail-out of the wheat or the sales in the Flagler stores that fall. But every storekeeper in town was still in business at Thanksgiving, and there had been no mass exodus from the farms. There had been more loss than the real estate men liked to admit, but less than the unhappy old-timer merchants had feared. Business in town was probably no better and not any worse than it had been the year before. I know that when Father tallied up his accounts and paid the interest on his note at the bank he said the News had done better than he expected when he bought it. “Not much, but a little. Business fell off in August, right after the hail. It picked up again in September. And October was more than ten percent better than June was.”
“Then you don’t think we’ll go broke,” Mother asked, “because I couldn’t stand to live in that awful shanty one more night?”
r /> “We haven’t gone broke yet,” Father said. “We may in another month, of course, but I doubt it. We’ve got Christmas coming, and I think I can get enough advertising for two extra pages every week till Christmas.” The way he said it, he had it all arranged and was quietly triumphant about it.
But Mother said, “After Christmas there’ll be January, and February, and everybody will say they are broke. They’ll say they spent all they had on Christmas. And then we will have to live on whatever we made in December.”
“Probably. But everybody will be in the same boat, won’t they? We shouldn’t be any worse off than anybody else.” And a few minutes later he asked her, “What do you want for Christmas?”
“Christmas? For heaven’s sakes! I’ve got my Christmas present, a house I can keep warm and clean. A place the dust and snow doesn’t blow right through like a sieve. Don’t you go wasting any money on a Christmas present for me, Will Borland!” Then she added, “Not this year.”
It seemed impossible that Christmas was only a few weeks away, but school had been in session three months and in only three more weeks it would let out for the Christmas holiday. I had had my report for mid-term, and my marks were in the 90s for all my classes. There wasn’t any talk of cutting me back to the regular freshman schedule. The only class where I was having any trouble at all was Latin, and I finally found what turned out to be my personal key. The teacher kept telling us that Latin would help us understand the meaning of English words. But it didn’t seem to help me when she said that “manufacture,” for instance, came from the Latin for “make by hand.” Even in those days, nearly everything that was manufactured was made by machine. Then one evening it occurred to me that this was all wrong end to. If I started from English I could do much better. “Decimal,” meaning by tens, led to decim, the Latin word for ten. “Manual,” meaning by hand, took me directly to the Latin manus. “Renovate,” meaning to make over and make new, led to the Latin novus, which means new; and so did “novitiate” and “novelty” and a lot of other words. I had a big vocabulary, so I found the clues everywhere I turned. And from then on Latin was easy. Even its grammar was easy because it was logical. I liked logical matters.