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Page 7
I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when
we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We
stumbled down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running
about with lanterns. I couldn't see any town, or even distant lights; we
were surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after
its long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people stood
huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew
this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The
woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little tin
trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old man,
tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding oilcloth
bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts. Presently a man
with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting and exclaiming.
I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever heard
a foreign tongue.
Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: `Hello, are you
Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for. I'm Otto
Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out. Hello,
Jimmy, ain't you scared to come so far west?'
I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern-light. He might
have stepped out of the pages of `Jesse James.' He wore a sombrero hat,
with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his moustache
were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and
ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across
one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top
of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian's. Surely
this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his
high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather
slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a
long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to
a hitching-bar where two farm-wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign
family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the
front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the
wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into
the empty darkness, and we followed them.
I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon
began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed.
Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and
peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no
fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I
could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land:
not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often
our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and
lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was
left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's
jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a
familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of
heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and
mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me
at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to
the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon
jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick.
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and
that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night:
here, I felt, what would be would be.
II
I DO NOT REMEMBER our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime before
daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses. When
I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely larger
than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was flapping
softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black
hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my grandmother.
She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes she smiled,
peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed.
`Had a good sleep, Jimmy?' she asked briskly. Then in a very different
tone she said, as if to herself, `My, how you do look like your father!' I
remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have come
to wake him like this when he overslept. `Here are your clean clothes,'
she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she talked. `But
first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice warm bath
behind the stove. Bring your things; there's nobody about.'
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