When Life Was Young Part 28

Thus ended our first Fourth of July at the farm.

I must add a word here relative to Enoch's clothes, however. The effigy hung there over the road for two days; but word had been sent to Enoch, who lived in another town, and on the third day he made his appearance for the purpose of reclaiming his garments; but meantime, either that morning or the previous evening, the effigy was stolen, or at least captured and carried off. The latter offense was finally traced to a pa.s.sing tin-peddler, who, when accused of it, declared that he had found the image lying in the road, and deemed the clothes old togs, fit only for paper rags and not worth advertising; he had therefore put them in his cart and driven on. He was subsequently shown to have sold the suit, not as paper rags; and when threatened with legal proceedings, he settled the matter on Enoch's own terms.

On the first day of the "Cattle Show," or County Fair, that fall, Enoch fell in with Alfred Batchelder, in the rear of the cattle sheds, and, to make use of a phrase common among fighting characters, "wiped up the ground with him"--not over clean ground, either--for a s.p.a.ce of several minutes. Our Halstead steered clear of him, however, and so far as I know, never received his just deserts for his share in the transaction,--which may, perhaps, be said to lie in the line of a remark which Elder Witham was fond of making in his quaint sermon against the Universalists. "Justice," quoth the Elder, "certainly does not get done in this brief, imperfect life of ours. Many of the worst wrongs men do us go unredressed in spite of our best efforts to square accounts with them!"

I recollect, also, that as we had unharnessed old Sol in the wagon-house that night and led him out, we noticed a great light in the sky, away to the southward. It shone up high in the heavens, but was pale, as if a long distance off. I asked Addison what he thought it could be, and he said there must be a great fire somewhere in that direction. We thought no more about it at the time; but toward evening next day a rumor reached us, afterwards confirmed, that a great part of the city of Portland had burned, entailing a loss of nearly or quite twenty millions of dollars.

But along with all these distracting incidents of the Fourth of July, there was a bit of seriousness and worry that lingered in a back nook of my mind, connected with that funeral which the Old Squire and I had attended. I felt that there was something, some question concerning it, which I must solve, or settle, before I could feel right again. I had never seen a person lying dead before; I tried not to think about it and in part succeeded, when there were a good many other things going on, yet all the time I knew that it was there in my mind and must be thought about before long. When I was very tired and first shut my eyes, on lying down at night, I would see that man in his coffin so plainly that I would fairly jump in bed, and then have to turn over several times and begin talking with Halstead, somewhat to his annoyance, for without quite understanding it, I suppose, he yet perceived that it was not a genuine conversational effort.

During the days following the Fourth, this impression of death which had entered my mind began to a.s.sume more definite limits, and grew pertinent to my own status. I had heard that the average age of man was thirty-three years, and granting that I should reach that age, I could expect to live a little over twenty years more. That was a long time, to be sure, twenty years; but it would pa.s.s, and at the end of it I should have to die and look as that man looked, and be buried in the ground.

The thought of it caused me to gasp suddenly, and filled me with a sense of terror and despair so awful that I could scarcely restrain myself from crying out. Most young people, I conjecture, pa.s.s through a similar mental experience, when the drear fact of death is first realized.

It continued to weigh heavily on my mind; and by way of relief from it, I followed Theodora out into the garden the next Sunday evening, and after quite an effort, opened the subject with her. There was no one else with whom I could have summoned resolution to broach that topic.

"Did you ever see anybody after they were dead?" I asked her.

She did not seem very much surprised at the question, since it was Sabbath eve. "Do you mean their body?" she inquired.

"Yes, their body," I replied.

"I have seen three," she said, at length.

"Didn't it make you feel strange?" I asked. "It did me. It is an awful thing to die and be put down into the ground, with all that earth on one."

"Oh, but they don't know it," said Theodora. "It is only their dead bodies; their spirits are far away."

"Yes," I said, "but I cannot help thinking of their bodies, and that it is them still, only they cannot wake up and speak."

"Oh, no, their spirits are far away," replied my gentle cousin, confidently.

"But that man, the one whose funeral Gramp and I went to, he died intoxicated. Where do you honestly think he is now?" I asked her.

"It's a dreadful thing to think of," replied Theodora, solemnly. "You know the Bible says, no drunkard can go to heaven."

"Then he will be burned forever and ever and ever, won't he?" I said.

"I suppose he will," she said, and taking out her handkerchief, she wiped her eyes sadly.

"Do you think it will be real fire and that it will smart just as it does when we burn our fingers?" I asked her.

"Maybe worse," Theodora replied, again wiping her eyes. "But sometimes I cannot believe that it will be all the time, night and day, year after year. Maybe it is wicked to hope it will not be, but I do want to think that _they would stop sometimes_. Universalists teach that n.o.body will be punished at all after they die; but Gram thinks they are not real Christians. Our folks all believe that the wicked will be punished forever, and the Bible does say so, I suppose. Grandmother says that all the great Bible scholars agree that the wicked will be punished."

"What does Ad think?" I asked, at length.

"I don't know. I'm afraid that he doesn't think at all," replied Theodora. "The thing I do not like in Cousin Addison is that he will never take a serious view of these important questions. The time he had the measles, he was very sick one day, and I said that I hoped that his mind was at peace. He looked at me as if he were a little frightened at first, for I suppose he thought that I thought that he was going to die, for I did begin in a sort of clumsy way. His head was swelled nearly as big again as it ought to have been, and he looked very queer about the eyes. 'O Doad!' he exclaimed, 'please do talk of things that you know something about.' But of course he felt peevish, being so sick."

"I suppose he did," said I. "But isn't it awful that everybody's got to die--and no getting away from it?"

"Yes, it does make any one feel dreadfully sad," Theodora a.s.sented. "But the good will be better off."

I did not gain much comfort from the conversation, however, and for years thereafter the thought of death filled me with the same choking sense of terror.

CHAPTER XVI

WOOD-CHUCKS IN THE CLOVER--ADDISON'S STRATAGEM

Creameries with ice-chests were as yet unheard of in the rural counties of Maine in 1866. At the old farm, all of the dairy milk was set in pans on the clean, cool cellar bottom. As the warm mornings of midsummer drew on, Gram was usually up by five o'clock, attending to her cream and b.u.t.ter; and about this time, as we issued drowsily forth, in response to the Old Squire's early rap, we were repeatedly startled at hearing a sudden eldritch exclamation which was half scream, at the foot of the bulkhead stairs.

"What's the matter down there, Ruth?" the Old Squire would exclaim.

"Dear me, I've stepped on that hateful toad again!" Gram would reply.

"It's always under foot there! Do, Ellen, you get the tongs and carry that toad off again. Carry him away out to the foot of the garden, below the currant bushes. I don't see how he is forever getting back to the foot of those stairs! It gives me such a start, to put my foot on him!"

And Gram would have to sit down for a time, to fan herself and to recover her composure.

"Well, Ruth, I should think it would give the toad a start, too," the Old Squire would comment, dryly.

Meantime Ellen or Addison would proceed to capture the toad--a fine, big brown chunk of a toad--and exile him to the garden. Once Ellen carried him, wriggling in the tongs, around to the back side of the west barn.

Ad, too, carried him out into the orchard one night. But by the next day, or the day following, toady would be back at the foot of the bulkhead stairs again. There is no doubt that it was the same toad, and he certainly must have possessed a good sense of locality. We could not for some time imagine how he obtained entrance to the cellar, for he returned to his favorite cool spot on days when the outer bulkhead door was closed. Addison at length decided that he must have got in by way of the cellar drain, on the back side of the house.

It was contrary to all the homely traditions at the farm to kill or maltreat a toad. Not less than seven times was that toad carefully carried away into the garden, or down the lane.

At last Gram's patience was exhausted. Her ire rose. "I'll see if you come back into my cellar again, old fellow," she exclaimed, before breakfast one morning after the recusant batrachian had been transported the night before. This time the old lady seized the tongs herself, and marched out into the yard, holding toady with no gentle pinch on his rotund body.

"Ellen, you bring me a quart of that brine out of the beef barrel," she called back to the kitchen.

Then having put the toad down in the cart road leading out into the fields, she dashed him with brine, and as he hopped away pursued him with further douches.

It is not likely that the brine injured the reptile very much, but for some reason it never came back.

For a long time thereafter the Old Squire was accustomed to touch up Gram's conscience now and then, by making sly allusion to her hard-heartedness and cruelty in "pickling toads." The Old Squire, too, had his bucolic enemies as well as Gram.

Wheet-wh-wh-wh-wh-wheedle! was a note we now began to hear daily about the stone walls and in the fields of new clover.

"Oh, those wood-chucks!" the old gentleman would exclaim. "They are making shocking work over in that new piece. Boys, I'll give you five cents a head for every wood-chuck you will kill off."

Amidst the now rapidly blossoming red clover we could see the fresh earth of numbers of their burrows, and almost every day a new one would be espied beside a rock or stone heap. June is the happy month for wood-chucks, in New England; they riot in the farmer's clover, and tunnel the soft hillsides with their holes. June is the month, too, when mother wood-chuck is leading out her four or five chubby little chucks, teaching them the fear of dogs and man, which const.i.tutes the wisdom of a wood-chuck's life, and giving them their first lesson in that shrill, yet guttural note peculiar to wood-chuckdom, which country boys call "whistling."

It is remarkable how many wood-chucks will not only get a living, but wax fat on an old farm where the farmer himself has difficulty in making year's ends meet. Addison estimated that at one time there were seventy wood-chucks on the Old Squire's homestead, all prosperous and laying by something, metaphorically speaking, for a rainy day.

Despite all the evil that is said of the wood-chuck, too, he does in reality a much smaller amount of damage to man than one would imagine from the outcry against him. Occasionally, it is true, a chuck will begin nibbling at early pease, or beans, and do real, measurable harm, but the injury which he inflicts on the farmer in the hay-fields is generally much exaggerated. In the "south field" that year, there were two acres of red clover, where not less than seven or eight wood-chucks dug new holes and threw out mounds of yellow earth, which in some places crushed down the crop. Then, too, in feeding and running about, they trampled on plats of the thick clover, particularly where it had "lodged" from its own rank growth. There were, in all, five or six square rods of the gra.s.s which it was not deemed worth while to attempt to mow at all, and the loss of which was due in part, but not wholly, to the wood-chucks. The hired men scolded about it, and Gramp himself, who had a farmer's natural aversion to wood-chucks, fretted over it. We boys, too, magnified the damage and discussed ingenious plans for exterminating them. But after all, I do not believe that we really got two hundred weight of hay less in the field, in consequence of wood-chucks; and certainly the clover as it stood was not worth sixty cents a hundred. A dollar and twenty cents would probably have made good the entire loss; and I suspect that one-half of the damage from trampling on the clover was done by us boys, in pursuit of the chucks, rather than by the chucks themselves. At least, I still remember running through the gra.s.s in a very reckless manner on several occasions.

I am keenly aware that to write anything in defense of the wood-chuck will prove unpopular with farmers and farmers' boys. Still, I venture to ask whether we are not, perhaps, a little too much inclined to deem the earth and everything that grows out of it our own particular property.

The wood-chuck is undoubtedly an older resident on this continent than men, certainly a far older resident than white men, who came here less than three hundred years ago. Moreover, he is a quiet, inoffensive resident, never becomes a pauper, never gets intoxicated, nor creates any disturbance, minds his own business, and only "whistles" when astonished or suddenly attacked by man and his dogs. May it not be possible that he is honestly ent.i.tled to a few stalks of clover which grow in the country which he and his ancestors had inhabited for centuries before white men knew there was any such place as America?