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Page 60
Lena laughed. `You'll have to hurry up, Jim. If you're going to be a
preacher, I want you to marry me. You must promise to marry us all, and
then baptize the babies.'
Norwegian Anna, always dignified, looked at her reprovingly.
`Baptists don't believe in christening babies, do they, Jim?'
I told her I didn't know what they believed, and didn't care, and that I
certainly wasn't going to be a preacher.
`That's too bad,' Tiny simpered. She was in a teasing mood. `You'd make
such a good one. You're so studious. Maybe you'd like to be a professor.
You used to teach Tony, didn't you?'
Antonia broke in. `I've set my heart on Jim being a doctor. You'd be good
with sick people, Jim. Your grandmother's trained you up so nice. My papa
always said you were an awful smart boy.'
I said I was going to be whatever I pleased. `Won't you be surprised, Miss
Tiny, if I turn out to be a regular devil of a fellow?'
They laughed until a glance from Norwegian Anna checked them; the
high-school principal had just come into the front part of the shop to buy
bread for supper. Anna knew the whisper was going about that I was a sly
one. People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no
interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he
was with Tony and Lena or the three Marys.
The enthusiasm for the dance, which the Vannis had kindled, did not at once
die out. After the tent left town, the Euchre Club became the Owl Club,
and gave dances in the Masonic Hall once a week. I was invited to join,
but declined. I was moody and restless that winter, and tired of the
people I saw every day. Charley Harling was already at Annapolis, while I
was still sitting in Black Hawk, answering to my name at roll-call every
morning, rising from my desk at the sound of a bell and marching out like
the grammar-school children. Mrs. Harling was a little cool toward me,
because I continued to champion Antonia. What was there for me to do after
supper? Usually I had learned next day's lessons by the time I left the
school building, and I couldn't sit still and read forever.
In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting for diversion. There lay the
familiar streets, frozen with snow or liquid with mud. They led to the
houses of good people who were putting the babies to bed, or simply sitting
still before the parlour stove, digesting their supper. Black Hawk had two
saloons. One of them was admitted, even by the church people, to be as
respectable as a saloon could be. Handsome Anton Jelinek, who had rented
his homestead and come to town, was the proprietor. In his saloon there
were long tables where the Bohemian and German farmers could eat the
lunches they brought from home while they drank their beer. Jelinek kept
rye bread on hand and smoked fish and strong imported cheeses to please the
foreign palate. I liked to drop into his bar-room and listen to the talk.
But one day he overtook me on the street and clapped me on the shoulder.
`Jim,' he said, `I am good friends with you and I always like to see you.
But you know how the church people think about saloons. Your grandpa has
always treated me fine, and I don't like to have you come into my place,
because I know he don't like it, and it puts me in bad with him.'
So I was shut out of that.
One could hang about the drugstore; and listen to the old men who sat there
every evening, talking politics and telling raw stories. One could go to
the cigar factory and chat with the old German who raised canaries for
sale, and look at his stuffed birds. But whatever you began with him, the
talk went back to taxidermy. There was the depot, of course; I often went
down to see the night train come in, and afterward sat awhile with the
disconsolate telegrapher who was always hoping to be transferred to Omaha
or Denver, `where there was some life.' He was sure to bring out his
pictures of actresses and dancers. He got them with cigarette coupons, and
nearly smoked himself to death to possess these desired forms and faces.
For a change, one could talk to the station agent; but he was another
malcontent; spent all his spare time writing letters to officials
requesting a transfer. He wanted to get back to Wyoming where he could go
trout-fishing on Sundays. He used to say `there was nothing in life for
him but trout streams, ever since he'd lost his twins.'
These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other
lights burning downtown after nine o'clock. On starlight nights I used to
pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping
houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches.
They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with
spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all
their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them
managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of
evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and
cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of
existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices,
their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste,
every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those
houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to
make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the
dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the
only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all.
On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced; then there was a little stir in the
streets, and here and there one could see a lighted window until midnight.
But the next night all was dark again.
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