Poor White: A Novel Page 12

  CHAPTER XII

  After the success of his corn cutting machine and the apparatus forunloading coal cars that brought him a hundred thousand dollars in cash,Hugh could not remain the isolated figure he had been all through thefirst several years of his life in the Ohio community. From all sidesmen reached out their hands to him: and more than one woman thought shewould like to be his wife. All men lead their lives behind a wall ofmisunderstanding they themselves have built, and most men die in silenceand unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from hisfellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doingsomething that is impersonal, useful, and beautiful. Word of hisactivities is carried over the walls. His name is shouted and is carriedby the wind into the tiny inclosure in which other men live and in whichthey are for the most part absorbed in doing some petty task for thefurtherance of their own comfort. Men and women stop their complainingabout the unfairness and inequality of life and wonder about the manwhose name they have heard.

  From Bidwell, Ohio, to farms all over the Middle West, Hugh McVey'sname had been carried. His machine for cutting corn was called the McVeyCorn-Cutter. The name was printed in white letters against a backgroundof red on the side of the machine. Farmer boys in the States of Indiana,Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and all the great corn-growing Statessaw it and in idle moments wondered what kind of man had invented themachine they operated. A Cleveland newspaper man came to Bidwell andwent to Pickleville to see Hugh. He wrote a story telling of Hugh'searly poverty and his efforts to become an inventor. When the reportertalked to Hugh he found the inventor so embarrassed and uncommunicativethat he gave up trying to get a story. Then he went to Steve Hunter whotalked to him for an hour. The story made Hugh a strikingly romanticfigure. His people, the story said, came out of the mountains ofTennessee, but they were not poor whites. It was suggested that theywere of the best English stock. There was a tale of Hugh's having inhis boyhood contrived some kind of an engine that carried water from avalley to a mountain community; another of his having seen a clock ina store in a Missouri town and of his having later made a clock of woodfor his parents; and a tale of his having gone into the forest with hisfather's gun, shot a wild hog and carried it down the mountain side onhis shoulder in order to get money to buy school books. After the talewas printed the advertising manager of the corn-cutter factory got Hughto go with him one day to Tom Butterworth's farm. Many bushels of cornwere brought out of the corn cribs and a great mountain of corn wasbuilt on the ground at the edge of a field. Back of the mountain of cornwas a corn field just coming into tassel. Hugh was told to climb up onthe mountain and sit there. Then his picture was taken. It was sent tonewspapers all over the West with copies of the biography cut from theCleveland paper. Later both the picture and the biography were used inthe catalogue that described the McVey Corn-Cutter.

  The cutting of corn and putting it in shocks against the time of thehusking is heavy work. In recent times it has come about that much ofthe corn grown on mid-American prairie lands is not cut. The corn isleft standing in the fields, and men go through it in the late fall topick the yellow ears. The workers throw the corn over their shouldersinto a wagon driven by a boy, who follows them in their slow progress,and it is then hauled away to the cribs. When a field has been picked,the cattle are turned in and all winter they nibble at the dry cornblades and tramp the stalks into the ground. All day long on the widewestern prairies when the gray fall days have come, you may see the menand the horses working their way slowly through the fields. Like tinyinsects they crawl across the immense landscapes. After them in the latefall and in the winter when the prairies are covered with snow, come thecattle. They are brought from the far West in cattle cars and after theyhave nibbled the corn blades all day, are taken to barns and stuffedto bursting with corn. When they are fat they are sent to the greatkilling-pens in Chicago, the giant city of the prairies. In the stillfall nights, as you stand on prairie roads or in the barnyard back ofone of the farm houses, you may hear the rustling of the dry corn bladesand then the crash of the heavy bodies of the beasts going forward asthey nibble and trample the corn.

  In earlier days the method of corn harvesting was different. There waspoetry in the operation then as there is now, but it was set to anotherrhythm. When the corn was ripe men went into the fields with heavy cornknives and cut the stalks of corn close to the ground. The stalks werecut with the right hand swinging the corn knife and carried on the leftarm. All day a man carried a heavy load of the stalks from which yellowears hung down. When the load became unbearably heavy it was carried tothe shock, and when all the corn was cut in a certain area, the shockwas made secure by binding it with tarred rope or with a tough stalktwisted to take the place of the rope. When the cutting was done thelong rows of stalks stood up in the fields like sentinels, and the mencrawled off to the farmhouses and to bed, utterly weary.

  Hugh's machine took all of the heavier part of the work away. It cutthe corn near the ground and bound it into bundles that fell upon aplatform. Two men followed the machine, one to drive the horses and theother to place the bundles of stalks against the shocks and to bind thecompleted shocks. The men went along smoking their pipes and talking.The horses stopped and the driver stared out over the prairies. His armsdid not ache with weariness and he had time to think. The wonder andmystery of the wide open places got a little into his blood. At nightwhen the work was done and the cattle fed and made comfortable in thebarns, he did not go at once to bed but sometimes went out of his houseand stood for a moment under the stars.

  This thing the brain of the son of a mountain man, the poor white ofthe river town, had done for the people of the plains. The dreams he hadtried so hard to put away from him and that the New England womanSarah Shepard had told him would lead to his destruction had come tosomething. The car-dumping apparatus, that had sold for two hundredthousand dollars, had given Steve Hunter money to buy the plant-settingmachine factory, and with Tom Butterworth to start manufacturing thecorn-cutters, had affected the lives of fewer people, but it had carriedthe Missourian's name into other places and had also made a new kind ofpoetry in railroad yards and along rivers at the back of cities whereships are loaded. On city nights as you lie in your houses you may hearsuddenly a long reverberating roar. It is a giant that has cleared histhroat of a carload of coal. Hugh McVey helped to free the giant. Heis still doing it. In Bidwell, Ohio, he is still at it, making newinventions, cutting the bands that have bound the giant. He is one manwho had not been swept aside from his purpose by the complexity of life.

  That, however, came near happening. After the coming of his success,a thousand little voices began calling to him. The soft hands of womenreached out of the masses of people about him, out of the old dwellersand new dwellers in the city that was growing up about the factorieswhere his machines were being made in ever increasing numbers. Newhouses were constantly being built along Turner's Pike that led downto his workshop at Pickleville. Beside Allie Mulberry a dozen mechanicswere now employed in his experimental shop. They helped Hugh with a newinvention, a hay-loading apparatus on which he was at work, and alsomade special tools for use in the corn-cutter factory and the newbicycle factory. A dozen new houses had been built in Picklevilleitself. The wives of the mechanics lived in the houses and occasionallyone of them came to see her husband at Hugh's shop. He found it less andless difficult to talk to people. The workmen, themselves not given tothe use of many words, did not think his habitual silence peculiar. Theywere more skilled than Hugh in the use of tools and thought it rather anaccident that he had done what they had not done. As he had grown richby that road they also tried their hand at inventions. One of them madea patent door hinge that Steve sold for ten thousand dollars, keepinghalf the money for his services, as he had done in the case of Hugh'scar-dumping apparatus. At the noon hour the men hurried to their housesto eat and then came back to loaf before the factory and smoke theirnoonday pipes. They talked of money-making, of the price of food stuffs,of the
advisability of a man's buying a house on the partial paymentplan. Sometimes they talked of women and of their adventures with women.Hugh sat by himself inside the door of the shop and listened. At nightafter he had gone to bed he thought of what they had said. He lived ina house belonging to a Mrs. McCoy, the widow of a railroad section handkilled in a railroad accident, who had a daughter. The daughter, RoseMcCoy, taught a country school and most of the year was away from homefrom Monday morning until late on Friday afternoon. Hugh lay in bedthinking of what his workmen had said of women and heard the oldhousekeeper moving about down stairs. Sometimes he got out of bed to sitby an open window. Because she was the woman whose life touched hismost closely, he thought often of the school teacher. The McCoy house, asmall frame affair with a picket fence separating it from Turner's Pike,stood with its back door facing the Wheeling Railroad. The section handson the railroad remembered their former fellow workman, Mike McCoy,and wanted to be good to his widow. They sometimes dumped half decayedrailroad ties over the fence into a potato patch back of the house. Atnight, when heavily loaded coal trains rumbled past, the brakemen heavedlarge chunks of coal over the fence. The widow awoke whenever a trainpassed. When one of the brakemen threw a chunk of coal he shouted andhis voice could be heard above the rumble of the coal cars. "That's forMike," he cried. Sometimes one of the chunks knocked a picket out of thefence and the next day Hugh put it back again. When the train had passedthe widow got out of bed and brought the coal into the house. "I don'twant to give the boys away by leaving it lying around in the daylight,"she explained to Hugh. On Sunday mornings Hugh took a crosscut saw andcut the railroad ties into lengths that would go into the kitchen stove.Slowly his place in the McCoy household had become fixed, and when hereceived the hundred thousand dollars and everybody, even the motherand daughter, expected him to move, he did not do so. He triedunsuccessfully to get the widow to take more money for his board andwhen that effort failed, life in the McCoy household went as it had whenhe was a telegraph operator receiving forty dollars a month.

  In the spring or fall, as he sat by his window at night, and when themoon came up and the dust in Turner's Pike was silvery white, Hughthought of Rose McCoy, sleeping in some farmer's house. It did not occurto him that she might also be awake and thinking. He imagined her lyingvery still in bed. The section hand's daughter was a slender woman ofthirty with tired blue eyes and red hair. Her skin had been heavilyfreckled in her youth and her nose was still freckled. Although Hugh didnot know it, she had once been in love with George Pike, the Wheelingstation agent, and a day had been set for the marriage. Then adifficulty arose in regard to religious beliefs and George Pike marriedanother woman. It was then she became a school teacher. She was a womanof few words and she and Hugh had never been alone together, but asHugh sat by the window on fall evenings, she lay awake in a room in thefarmer's house, where she was boarding during the school season, andthought of him. She thought that had Hugh remained a telegraph operatorat forty dollars a month something might have happened between them.Then she had other thoughts, or rather, sensations that had little to dowith thoughts. The room in which she lay was very still and a streak ofmoonlight came in through the window. In the barn back of the farmhouseshe could hear the cattle stirring about. A pig grunted and in thestillness that followed she could hear the farmer, who lay in the nextroom with his wife, snoring gently. Rose was not very strong and thephysical did not rule in her nature, but she was very lonely and thoughtthat, like the farmer's wife, she would like to have a man to lie withher. Warmth crept over her body and her lips became dry so that shemoistened them with her tongue. Had you been able to creep unobservedinto the room, you might have thought her much like a kitten lying bya stove. She closed her eyes and gave herself over to dreams. In herconscious mind she dreamed of being the wife of the bachelor Hugh McVey,but deep within her there was another dream, a dream having its basisin the memory of her one physical contact with a man. When they wereengaged to be married George had often kissed her. On one evening in thespring they had gone to sit together on the grassy bank beside the creekin the shadow of the pickle factory, then deserted and silent, and hadcome near to going beyond kissing. Why nothing else had happened Rosedid not exactly know. She had protested, but her protest had been feebleand had not expressed what she felt. George Pike had desisted in hiseffort to press love upon her because they were to be married, and hedid not think it right to do what he thought of as taking advantage of agirl.

  At any rate he did desist and long afterward, as she lay in thefarmhouse consciously thinking of her mother's bachelor boarder, herthoughts became less and less distinct and when she had slipped off intosleep, George Pike came back to her. She stirred uneasily in bed andmuttered words. Rough but gentle hands touched her cheeks and played inher hair. As the night wore on and the position of the moon shifted, thestreak of moonlight lighted her face. One of her hands reached up andseemed to be caressing the moonbeams. The weariness had all gone out ofher face. "Yes, George, I love you, I belong to you," she whispered.

  Had Hugh been able to creep like the moonbeam into the presence of thesleeping school teacher, he must inevitably have loved her. Also hewould perhaps have understood that it is best to approach human beingsdirectly and boldly as he had approached the mechanical problems bywhich his days were filled. Instead he sat by his window in the presenceof the moonlit night and thought of women as beings utterly unlikehimself. Words dropped by Sarah Shepard to the awakening boy camecreeping back to his mind. He thought women were for other men but notfor him, and told himself he did not want a woman.

  And then in Turner's Pike something happened. A farmer boy, who had beento town and who had the daughter of a neighbor in his buggy, stopped infront of the house. A long freight train, grinding its way slowly pastthe station, barred the passage along the road. He held the reins in onehand and put the other about the waist of his companion. The two headssought each other and lips met. They clung to each other. The same moonthat shed its light on Rose McCoy in the distant farmhouse lighted theopen place where the lovers sat in the buggy in the road. Hugh had toclose his eyes and fight to put down an almost overpowering physicalhunger in himself. His mind still protested that women were not for him.When his fancy made for him a picture of the school teacher RoseMcCoy sleeping in a bed, he saw her only as a chaste white thing to beworshiped from afar and not to be approached, at least not by himself.Again he opened his eyes and looked at the lovers whose lips still clungtogether. His long slouching body stiffened and he sat up very straightin his chair. Then he closed his eyes again. A gruff voice broke thesilence. "That's for Mike," it shouted and a great chunk of coal thrownfrom the train bounded across the potato patch and struck against theback of the house. Downstairs he could hear old Mrs. McCoy getting outof bed to secure the prize. The train passed and the lovers in thebuggy sank away from each other. In the silent night Hugh could hear theregular beat of the hoofs of the farmer boy's horse as it carried himand his woman away into the darkness.

  The two people, living in the house with the old woman who had almostfinished her life, and themselves trying feebly to reach out to life,never got to anything very definite in relation to each other. OneSaturday evening in the late fall the Governor of the State came toBidwell. There was a parade to be followed by a political meeting andthe Governor, who was a candidate for re-election, was to address thepeople from the steps of the town hall. Prominent citizens were to standon the steps beside the Governor. Steve and Tom were to be there, andthey had asked Hugh to come, but he had refused. He asked Rose McCoyto go to the meeting with him, and they set out from the house at eighto'clock and walked to town. Then they stood at the edge of the crowdin the shadow of a store building and listened to the speech. To Hugh'samazement his name was mentioned. The Governor spoke of the prosperityof the town, indirectly hinting that it was due to the politicalsagacity of the party of which he was a representative, and thenmentioned several individuals also partly responsible. "The wholecountry is sweepi
ng forward to new triumphs under our banner," hedeclared, "but not every community is so fortunate as I find you here.Labor is employed at good wages. Life here is fruitful and happy. Youare fortunate here in having among you such business men as StevenHunter and Thomas Butterworth; and in the inventor Hugh McVey you haveone of the greatest intellects and the most useful men that ever livedto help lift the burden off the shoulder of labor. What his brain isdoing for labor, our party is doing in another way. The protectivetariff is really the father of modern prosperity."

  The speaker paused and a cheer arose from the crowd. Hugh took holdof the school teacher's arm and drew her away down a side street. Theywalked home in silence, but when they got to the house and were aboutto go in, the school teacher hesitated. She wanted to ask Hugh to walkabout in the darkness with her but did not have the courage of herdesires. As they stood at the gate and as the tall man with the longserious face looked down at her, she remembered the speaker's words."How could he care for me? How could a man like him care anything for ahomely little school teacher like me?" she asked herself. Aloud she saidsomething quite different. As they had come along Turner's Pike she hadmade up her mind she would boldly suggest a walk under the trees alongTurner's Pike beyond the bridge, and had told herself that she wouldlater lead him to the place beside the stream and in the shadow of theold pickle factory where she and George Pike had come so near beinglovers. Instead she hesitated for a moment by the gate and then laughedawkwardly and passed in. "You should be proud. I would be proud if Icould be spoken of like that. I don't see why you keep living here in acheap little house like ours," she said.

  On a warm spring Sunday night during the year in which Clara Butterworthcame back to Bidwell to live, Hugh made what was for him an almostdesperate effort to approach the school teacher. It had been a rainyafternoon and Hugh had spent a part of it in the house. He came overfrom his shop at noon and went to his room. When she was at home theschool teacher occupied a room next his own. The mother who seldom leftthe house had on that day gone to the country to visit a brother. Thedaughter got dinner for herself and Hugh and he tried to help her washthe dishes. A plate fell out of his hands and its breaking seemed tobreak the silent, embarrassed mood that had possession of them. For afew minutes they were children and acted like children. Hugh pickedup another plate and the school teacher told him to put it down. Herefused. "You're as awkward as a puppy. How you ever manage to doanything over at that shop of yours is more than I know."

  Hugh tried to keep hold of the plate which the school teacher tried tosnatch away and for a few minutes they struggled laughing. Her cheekswere flushed and Hugh thought she looked bewitching. An impulse hehad never had before came to him. He wanted to shout at the top of hislungs, throw the plate at the ceiling, sweep all of the dishes off thetable and hear them crash on the floor, play like some huge animalloose in a tiny world. He looked at Rose and his hands trembled from thestrength of the strange impulse. As he stood staring she took the plateout of his hand and went into the kitchen. Not knowing what else to dohe put on his hat and went for a walk. Later he went to the shop andtried to work, but his hand trembled when he tried to hold a tool andthe hay-loading apparatus on which he was at work seemed suddenly a verytrivial and unimportant thing.

  At four o'clock Hugh got back to the house and found it apparentlyempty, although the door leading to Turner's Pike was open. The rainhad stopped falling and the sun struggled to work its way through theclouds. He went upstairs to his own room and sat on the edge of his bed.The conviction that the daughter of the house was in her room next doorcame to him, and although the thought violated all the beliefs he hadever held regarding women in relation to himself, he decided that shehad gone to her room to be near him when he came in. For some reason heknew that if he went to her door and knocked she would not be surprisedand would not refuse him admission. He took off his shoes and setthem gently on the floor. Then he went on tiptoes out into the littlehallway. The ceiling was so low that he had to stoop to avoid knockinghis head against it. He raised his hand intending to knock on the door,and then lost courage. Several times he went into the hallway with thesame intent, and each time returned noiselessly to his own room. He satin the chair by the window and waited. An hour passed. He heard a noisethat indicated that the school teacher had been lying on her bed. Thenhe heard footsteps on the stairs, and presently saw her go out of thehouse and go along Turner's Pike. She did not go toward town but overthe bridge past his shop and into the country. Hugh drew himself backout of sight. He wondered where she could be going. "The roads aremuddy. Why does she go out? Is she afraid of me?" he asked himself. Whenhe saw her turn at the bridge and look back toward the house, his handstrembled again. "She wants me to follow. She wants me to go with her,"he thought.

  Hugh did presently go out of the house and along the road but did notmeet the school teacher. She had in fact crossed the bridge and had gonealong the bank of the creek on the farther side. Then she crossedover again on a fallen log and went to stand by the wall of the picklefactory. A lilac bush grew beside the wall and she stood out of sightbehind it. When she saw Hugh in the road her heart beat so heavily thatshe had difficulty in breathing. He went along the road and presentlypassed out of sight, and a great weakness took possession of her.Although the grass was wet she sat on the ground against the wall of thebuilding and closed her eyes. Later she put her face in her hands andwept.

  The perplexed inventor did not get back to his boarding house untillate that night, and when he did he was unspeakably glad that he had notknocked on the door of Rose McCoy's room. He had decided during the walkthat the whole notion that she had wanted him had been born in his ownbrain. "She's a nice woman," he had said to himself over and over duringthe walk, and thought that in coming to that conclusion he had sweptaway all possibilities of anything else in her. He was tired when he gothome and went at once to bed. The old woman came home from the countryand her brother sat in his buggy and shouted to the school teacher, whocame out of her room and ran down the stairs. He heard the two womencarry something heavy into the house and drop it on the floor. Thefarmer brother had given Mrs. McCoy a bag of potatoes. Hugh thought ofthe mother and daughter standing together downstairs and was unspeakablyglad he had not given way to his impulse toward boldness. "She would betelling her now. She is a good woman and would be telling her now," hethought.

  At two o'clock that night Hugh got out of bed. In spite of theconviction that women were not for him, he had found himself unable tosleep. Something that shone in the eyes of the school teacher, when shestruggled with him for the possession of the plate, kept calling to himand he got up and went to the window. The clouds had all gone out of thesky and the night was clear. At the window next his own sat Rose McCoy.She was dressed in a night gown and was looking away along Turner's Piketo the place where George Pike the station master lived with his wife.Without giving himself time to think, Hugh knelt on the floor and withhis long arm reached across the space between the two windows. Hisfingers had almost touched the back of the woman's head and ached toplay in the mass of red hair that fell down over her shoulders, whenagain self-consciousness overcame him. He drew his arm quickly back andstood upright in the room. His head banged against the ceiling and heheard the window of the room next door go softly down. With a consciouseffort he took himself in hand. "She's a good woman. Remember, she's agood woman," he whispered to himself, and when he got again into his bedhe refused to let his mind linger on the thoughts of the school teacher,but compelled them to turn to the unsolved problems he still had to facebefore he could complete his hay-loading apparatus. "You tend to yourbusiness and don't be going off on that road any more," he said, asthough speaking to another person. "Remember she's a good woman and youhaven't the right. That's all you have to do. Remember you haven't theright," he added with a ring of command in his voice.