Chapter XVI

Days of snow followed by rain, with deep mud in the unpaved streets of Tar’s Ohio town. In March always a few warm days. Tar, with Jim Moore, Hal Brown and a few others, lit out for the swimming hole. The water was high. Along the bank of the creek the pussy-willows were blossoming. To the boys it seemed that all nature was shouting, “Spring has come, spring has come.” What fun to take off heavy coats, heavy boots. The Moorehead boys had to wear cheap boots that by March were full of holes. On cold days the snow worked its way through broken soles.

The boys stood on the creek bank looking at each other. A few insects were out. A bee flew past Tar’s face. “Lordy! I dare you! You go in and I will.”

The boys took off their clothes and plunged in. What a disappointment! How icy cold the swift-running water! They got out quickly and dressed shivering.

Fun, though, to go wandering along creek banks, through leafless strips of forest, the clear sun shining. A grand day to play hookey from school. Suppose a boy gets a hiding from the superintendent. What’s the diff?

During the cold winter months Tar’s father managed to stay away from home a good deal. The slender girl he had married had been the mother of seven children. You know what that does to a woman. When she isn’t very well she looks like the devil. Gaunt cheeks, stooped shoulders, hands always trembling.

Men like Tar’s father take life as it comes. Life rolls off them like water off a duck’s back. What’s the use hanging around where there is sadness in the air, trouble you can’t remedy, being what you are?

Dick Moorehead liked people and people liked him. He told stories, drank hard cider at farmhouses. All his life afterwards Tar remembered a few trips he took with Dick to the country. There was one house where he saw two great German women, one married, the other single and living with her sister. The German woman’s husband was also large. They had a whole keg of beer on tap, oceans of food on the table. Dick seemed more at home there than in town, in the Moorehead house. In the evening some neighbors came in and they all danced. Dick was like a kid, swinging the big girls around. He could crack such jokes that all the men whooped with laughter and the women giggled and blushed. Tar couldn’t understand the jokes. He sat in a corner staring.

At another time in the country in the summer a lot of men camped in the woods at the edge of a creek. They were ex-soldiers, making a night of it.

And again, with the coming of darkness, women came. That was when Dick began to shine. People liked to have him because he made everything lively. That night by the camp fire, when every one thought Tar was asleep, both the men and women got a little lit up. Dick went with a woman back into the darkness. You couldn’t tell who the women were, who the men were. Dick knew all kinds of people. He had one kind of life at home in town and another when he was abroad. Why did he take his son on such expeditions? It may have been that Mary Moorehead asked him to take the boy and he did not know how to get out of it. Tar couldn’t stay away long. He had to get back to town and tend up to his papers. Both times they left town in the evening and Dick brought him back the next day. Then Dick cut out again, alone. Two kinds of lives led by the man who was Tar’s father, two kinds of lives led by a lot of quiet-seeming men of the town.

Tar got onto a lot of things, slowly. When you are a boy you don’t go around selling papers with your eyes shut. The more you can see the better you like it.

Maybe later you lead several kinds of lives yourself. You are one thing to-day and another to-morrow, changing like the weather.

There are solid people and people not so solid. It’s more fun on the whole not to be too solid. Solid good people miss a lot.

It might have been that Tar’s mother knew things she never let on to know. What she knew or did not know left something for Tar to think about and wonder about all the rest of his life. Hatred of his father came and then, a long time afterwards, understanding. A lot of women are like mothers with their husbands. They have to be. Some men can’t grow up. A woman has a lot of kids and she gets so and so. What she wanted from a man, at first, she doesn’t want any more. Better let him go and have his fling. Life isn’t so gay for any of us, when we are poor, anyway. There comes a time when a woman wants her children to have their chance and that is about all she asks. She would like to live long enough to see that happen, and then ...

Tar’s mother must have been glad most of her children were boys. The cards are stacked better for boys. No denying that.

The Moorehead house, with Tar’s mother nowadays always half ill and growing constantly weaker, was no place for such a one as Dick. Now the woman of the house was living on her nerve. She was living because she did not want to die, not yet. Such a woman grows very determined and silent. The husband, more than the children, feels her silence as a kind of reproach. God, what can a man do?

Some obscure disease eating at Mary Moorehead’s body. She did her work in the house, with Margaret’s assistance, and still took in family washings, but she grew constantly paler and her hands trembled more and more. John worked every day in a factory. He, too, was growing habitually silent. The work may have been too heavy for his young body. In Tar’s childhood no one spoke of laws about children in factories.

The slender long work-roughened fingers of Tar’s mother fascinated him. He remembered them clearly long afterward when her figure began to grow dim in his mind. It may have been the memory of his mother’s hands that made him think so much about other people’s hands. With their hands young lovers touched each other tenderly, painters spent a long life-time training the hands to follow the dictates of their fancies, men in workshops grasped tools with their hands. Hands young and strong, boneless soft hands at the ends of the arms of boneless soft men, hands of fighters--knocking other men down--the steady quiet hands of railroad engineers at the throttles of huge engines, soft hands creeping toward bodies in the night, hands beginning to age, to tremble, the hands of a mother that touch the babe, the hands of a mother remembered clearly, the hands of a father forgotten. A father remembered as a half-rebellious man, telling tales, grabbing huge German women boldly, grabbing what he could get his hands on, going along. Well, what’s a man to do anyway?

During the winter after the summer of his adventure in the barn with Mame Thompson, Tar got to hating a lot of things and people he had never before thought much about.

Sometimes he hated his father, sometimes a man called Hawkins. Sometimes it was a traveling man who lived in town but only came back home about once a month. Sometimes it was a man named Whaley who was a lawyer but, Tar thought, not much good.

Tar’s hatreds were nearly all concerned with money. He had got a money hunger that ate at him night and day. The feeling had grown in him because of his mother’s illness. If the Mooreheads had money, if they had a big warm house, if his mother had warm clothes--lots of them, like some women to whose houses he went delivering papers....

Well, Tar’s father might have been another sort of man. The gay kind are all right when you don’t need them for anything special, just want to be entertained. They can make you laugh all right.

Suppose you don’t feel much like laughing.

In the winter after John went to the factory he came home after dark at night. Tar was out in the dark delivering papers. Margaret hurried home from school and helped her mother. Margaret was O. K.

Tar thought much about money. He thought of food and clothes. There was a man came from the city and went skating on waterworks pond. He was the father of the girl who came to visit Colonel Farley. Tar had a lot of nerve thinking maybe he might get in with such a girl, from such a family. Mr. Farley was skating on the pond and he asked Tar to hold his overcoat. When he came to get it he gave Tar fifty cents. He did not know who Tar was, no more than if he had been a post on which he had hung his coat.

The coat Tar held for perhaps twenty minutes was lined with fur. It was made of such cloth as Tar had never seen before. Such a man, although he might be as old as Tar’s father, was like a boy. All the clothes he wore were such as it made you glad and sad to feel. A king might have worn such a coat. “If you have money enough you’re as good as a king and don’t have all the bother,” Tar thought.

If Tar’s mother had such a coat. What was the use thinking? You get to thinking and you get bluer and bluer. What good does it do? If you keep it up you’ll maybe get to acting the baby. Another kid comes along and says, “What’s the matter, Tar?” What are you going to answer?

Tar spent hours going about trying to think of new ways to make money. There are jobs to be had in a town but there are a lot of boys after them. He saw traveling men get off trains wearing fine warm clothes, women warmly clad. The traveling man who lived in town came home to see his wife. He stood in Shooter’s bar drinking with two other men and when Tar tackled him for the money he owed for his paper he took a large roll of bills out of his pocket.

“Oh, hell, boy, I ain’t got the change. Let it go till the next time.”

Let it go, indeed! A man like that doesn’t know what forty cents means. Such fellows, strutting around with some one else’s money in their pockets! If you get sore and insist they’ll stop the paper. You can’t afford to lose customers.

One evening Tar waited two hours in Lawyer Whaley’s office, trying to collect some money. It was getting near Christmas. Lawyer Whaley owed him fifty cents. He saw a man going up the stairway to the lawyer’s office and figured out maybe the man was a client. He had to watch such fellows as Lawyer Whaley pretty close. He owed money all over town. Such a man, when he has any money, will shovel it out, but he doesn’t get any very often. You’ve got to be on the spot.

On that particular evening, a week before Christmas, Tar saw the man, a farmer, go up to the office and as his paper train was late, he went right up after him. There was a small dark outer office and an inner one with a fire where the lawyer sat.

If you had to wait outside you got cold all right. Two or three cheap chairs, a rickety kind of a cheap table. Not even a magazine to look at. If there had been one it was so dark you couldn’t see.

Tar sat in the office waiting, filled with contempt. He thought about other lawyers in town. There was Lawyer King who had a big fine neat office. People said he fooled around with other men’s wives. Well, he was sharp, had about all the good practice in town. If such a man owed you money you didn’t spend any time being worried. Some day you met him on the street and he paid you up without your saying a word, thought of it himself and like as not gave you a quarter extra. At Christmas time such a man was good for a dollar. If it was two weeks after Christmas before he thought of it he forked it right over when he saw you.

Such a man might be free with other men’s wives, he might be up to sharp practice. Maybe other lawyers only said he was because they were jealous, and anyway his wife was pretty sloppy. Sometimes when Tar went around with the afternoon paper she didn’t even have her hair put up. The grass wasn’t ever cut in the yard, nothing was tended up to, but Lawyer King made up for it the way he fixed his office. It might be his liking to stay in his office rather than in his house was what made him such a good lawyer.

Tar sat a long time in Lawyer Whaley’s office. Inside he could hear the voices. When at last the farmer started to come out the two men stood a moment by the outer door and then the farmer took some money out of his pocket and gave it to the lawyer. When he went away he almost fell over Tar who was thinking that if he had any law business he would take it to Lawyer King--not to such a man as Whaley.

He got up and went into Lawyer Whaley’s office. “No chance now his telling me to wait ’til some other day.” The man was standing by the front window, still holding the money in his hand.

He knew what Tar wanted. “How much do I owe you?” he asked. It was fifty cents. He shoved out a two dollar bill and Tar had to think fast. If a boy had the luck to catch him flush such a man might give a dollar for Christmas or he might not give anything at all. Tar decided to say he hadn’t any change. The man might think of Christmas coming and give him an extra fifty cents or he might say, “Well, come around next week,” and Tar would have all his waiting for nothing. He would have to do it again.

“I haven’t got any change,” Tar said. Anyway he had taken the plunge. The man hesitated for a moment. There was a wavering uncertain light in his eyes. When a boy needs money as Tar did he learns to watch people’s eyes. After all, Lawyer Whaley had three or four kids and he didn’t get a client very often. He was thinking about Christmas for his own kids, maybe.

When such a man can’t make up his mind he is likely to do something foolish. That’s what makes him what he is. Tar stood with the two dollar bill in his hand waiting, not offering to give it back, and the man did not know what to do. At first he made a little motion with his hand, not very strong, and then he made it stronger.

He had taken the plunge. Tar felt a little ashamed and a little proud. He had worked the man just right. “Ah, keep the change. It’s for Christmas,” the man said. Tar was so surprised, getting the whole dollar and a half extra, that way, he could not answer. When he had got down into the street he realized he hadn’t even thanked Lawyer Whaley. He felt a little like going back and putting the extra dollar on the lawyer’s table. “Fifty cents is enough at Christmas from such a man as you.” Likely as not, when Christmas time came, he wouldn’t have a cent to get presents for his own kids. The lawyer had on a black coat, all worn shiny, and a little black tie, also shiny. Tar did not want to go back and he did want to keep the money. He did not know what to do. He had worked a game on the man, saying he had no change when he did have it, and the game had worked too well. If he had got but fifty cents, as he had planned, it would have been all right.

He kept the dollar and a half, took it home to his mother, but for several days every time he thought of the incident he was ashamed.

It’s the way things work out. You think up a slick scheme to get something for nothing and you get it. Then when you do get it, it isn’t half as nice as you hoped.