FORTY YEARS OF IT
One hot afternoon in the summer of my tenth year, my grandfather, having finished the nap he was accustomed to take after the heavy dinner which, in those days, was served at noon in his house, told me that I might go up town with him. This was not only a relief, but a prospect of adventure. It was a relief to have him finish his nap, because while he was taking his nap, my grandmother drew down at all the windows the heavy green shades, which, brought home by the family after a residence in Nuremberg, were decorated at the bottom with a frieze depicting scenes along the Rhine, and a heavy and somnolent silence was imposed on all the house. When my grandfather took his nap, life seemed to pause, all activities were held in suspense.
And the prospect was as a pleasant adventure, because whenever my grandfather let me go up town with him he always made me a present, which was sure to be more valuable, more expensive, than those little gifts at home, bestowed as rewards of various merits and sacrifices related to that institution of the afternoon nap, and forthcoming if he got through the nap satisfactorily, that is, without being awakened. They consisted of mere money, the little five or ten cent notes of green scrip; “shin-plasters” they were called, I believe, in those days.
When my grandfather had rearranged his toilet, combing his thick white hair and then immediately running his fingers through it to rumple it up and give him a savage aspect, we set forth.
He wore broad polished shoes, low, and fastened with buckles, and against the black of his attire his stiffly starched, immaculate white waistcoat was conspicuous. Only a few of its lower buttons of pearl were fastened; above that it was open, and from one of the buttonholes, the second from the top, his long gold watch-chain hung from its large gold hook. The black cravat was not hidden by his white beard, which he did not wear as long as many Ohio gentlemen of that day, and he was crowned by a large Panama hat, yellowed by years of summer service, and bisected by a ridge that began at the middle of the broad brim directly in front, ran back, climbed and surmounted the large high crown, and then, descending, ended its impressive career at the middle of the broad brim behind.
I was walking on his left hand, near the fence, but as we entered the shade of the elms and shrubbery of the Swedenborgian churchyard, I went around to his other side, because a ghost dwelt in the Swedenborgian churchyard. My cousin had pointed it out to me, and once I had seen it distinctly.
The precaution was unnecessary, for I had long known my grandfather for a brave man. He had been a soldier, and many persons in Urbana still saluted him as major, though at that time he was mayor; going up town, in fact, meant to go to the town hall before going anywhere else. In the shade he removed his hat, and taking out a large silk handkerchief, passed it several times over his red, perspiring face.
It was, as I have said, a hot afternoon, even for an August afternoon in Ohio, and it was the hottest hour of the afternoon. Main Street, when we turned into it presently, was deserted, and wore an unreal appearance, like the street of the dead town that was painted on the scene at the “opera-house.” Far to the south it stretched its interminable length in white dust, until its trees came together in that mysterious distance where the fairgrounds were, and to the north its vista was closed by the bronze figure of the cavalryman standing on his pedestal in the Square, his head bowed in sad meditation, one gauntleted hand resting on his hip, the other on his saber-hilt. Out over the thick dust of the street the heat quivered and vibrated, and if you squinted in the sun at the cavalryman, he seemed to move, to tremble, in the shimmer of that choking atmosphere.
The town hall stood in Market Square; for, in addition to the Square, where the bronze cavalryman stood on his pedestal, there was Market Square, the day of civic centers not having dawned on Urbana in that time, nor, doubtless, in this.
Market Square was not a square, however, but a parallelogram, and on one side of it, fronting Main Street, was the town hall, a low building of brick, representing in itself an amazing unity of municipal functions—the germ of the group plan, no doubt, and, after all, in its little way, a civic center indeed. For there, in an auditorium, plays were staged before a populace innocent of the fact that it had a municipal theater, and in another room the city council sat, with representatives from Lighttown, and Gooseville, and Guinea, and the other faubourgs of our little municipality. Under that long low roof, too, were the “calaboose” and the headquarters of the fire department. Back of these the structure sloped away into a market-house of some sort, with a public scales, and broad, low, overhanging eaves, in the shade of which firemen, and the city marshal, and other officials, in the dim retrospect, seem to have devoted their leisure to the game of checkers.
On the opposite side of Market Square there was a line of brick buildings, painted once, perhaps, and now of a faint pink or cerise which certain of the higher and more artistic grades of calcimining assume, and there seems to have been a series, almost interminable, of small saloons—declining and fading away somewhere to the east, in the dark purlieus of Guinea.
Here, along this line of saloons, if it was a line of saloons, or, if it was not, along the side of the principal saloon which in those wet days commanded that corner, there were always several carts, driven by Irishmen from Lighttown, smoking short clay pipes, and two-wheeled drays driven by negroes from Guinea or Gooseville. These negro drivers were burly men with shining black skins and gleaming eyes and teeth, whose merry laughter was almost belied by the ferocious, brutal whips they carried—whips precisely like that Simon Legree had wielded in the play in the theater just across the Square, now, by a stroke of poetic justice, in the hands of Uncle Tom himself. But on this day the firemen were not to be seen under the eaves of the market-house; their checker-boards were quite abandoned. The mules between the shafts of these two-wheeled drays hung their heads and their long ears drooped under the heat, and their black masters were curled up on the sidewalk against the wall of the saloon, asleep. The Irishmen were nowhere to be seen, and Market Square was empty, deserted, and sprawled there reflecting the light in a blinding way, while from the yellow, dusty level of its cobbled surface rose, wave on wave, palpably, that trembling, shimmering, vibrating heat. And yet, there was one waking, living thing in sight. There, out in the middle of the Square he stood, a dusty, drab figure, with an old felt hat on a head that must have ached and throbbed in that implacable heat, with a mass of rags upon him, his frayed trousers gathered at his ankles and bound about by irons, and a ball and chain to bind him to that spot. He had a broom in his hands, and was aimlessly making a little smudge of dust, doing his part in the observance of an old, cruel, and hideous superstition.
I knew, of course, that he was a prisoner. Usually there were three or four, sometimes half a dozen, such as he. They were the chain-gang, and they were Bad—made so by Rum. I knew that they were brought out of the calaboose, that damp, dark place under the roof of the market-house, somewhere between the office of the mayor and the headquarters of the fire department; and glimpses were to be caught now and then of their faces pressed against those bars.
When, under the shade of the broad eaves, we were about to enter the mayor’s office, my grandfather motioned to the prisoner out there in the center of the Square, who with a new alacrity dropped his broom, picked up his ball, and lugging it in his arms, came up close to us, so very close that I could see the sweat that drenched his forehead, stood in great beads on his upper lip, matted the hair on his forearms, stained with dark splashes his old shirt, and glistened on his throat and breast, burned red by the sun. He dropped his ball, took off that rag of a hat, raised eyelids that were powdered with dust, and looked at my grandfather.
“How many days did I give you?” my grandfather asked him.
“Fifteen, your honor,” he said.
“How long have you been in?”
“Three days, your honor.”
“Are you the only one in there?”
“Yes, your honor.”
My grandfather paused and looked at him.
“Pretty hot out there, isn’t it?” asked my grandfather.
The prisoner smiled, a smile exactly like that anyone would have for such a question, but the smile flickered from his face, as he said:
“Yes, your honor.”
My grandfather looked out over the Square and up and down. There was no one anywhere to be seen.
“Well, come on into the office.”
The prisoner picked up his ball, and followed my grandfather into the mayor’s office. My grandfather went to a desk, drew out a drawer, fumbled in it, found a key, and with this he stooped and unlocked the irons on the prisoner’s ankles. But he did not remove the irons—he seated himself in the large chair, and leaned comfortably against its squeaking cane back.
“Now,” my grandfather said, “you go out there in the Square—be careful not to knock the leg irons off as you go,—and you sweep around for a little while, and when the coast is clear you kick them off and light out.”
The creature in the drab rags looked at my grandfather a moment, opened his lips, closed them, swallowed, and then....
“You’d better hurry,” said my grandfather, “I don’t know what minute the marshal——”
The prisoner gathered up his ball, hugged it carefully, almost tenderly, in his arms, and, with infinity delicacy as to the irons on his feet, he shuffled carefully, yet somehow swiftly out. I saw him an instant in the brilliant glittering sunlight framed by the door; he looked back, and then he disappeared, leaving only the blank surface of the cobblestones with the heat trembling over them.
My grandfather put on his glasses, turned to his desk, and took up some papers there. And I waited, in the still, hot room. The minutes were ticked off by the clock. I wondered at each loud tick if it was the minute in which it would be proper for the prisoner to kick off those irons from his ankles and start to run. And then, after a few minutes, a man appeared in the doorway, and said breathlessly:
“Joe, he has escaped!”
It was Uncle John, a brother of my grandfather, one of the Brands of Kentucky, then on a visit—one of those long visits by which he and my grandfather sought to make up the large arrears of the differences, the divisions, and the separations of the great war. He was nearly of my grandfather’s age, and like him a large man, with a white though longer beard. At his entrance my grandfather did not turn, nor speak, and Uncle John Brand cried again:
“Joe, he’s gone, I tell you; he’s getting away!”
My grandfather looked up then from his papers and said:
“John, you’d better come in out of that heat and sit down. You’re excited.”
“But he’s getting away, I tell you! Don’t you understand?”
“Who is getting away?”
“Why, that prisoner.”
“The prisoner out there in the Square. He has escaped! He’s gone!”
“But how do you know?”
“I just saw him running down Main Street like a streak of lightning.”
My grandfather took out his silk handkerchief, passed it over his brow, and said:
“To think of anyone running on a day like this!”
And Uncle John Brand stood there and gazed at his brother with an expression of despair.
“Can’t you understand,” he said, speaking in an intense tone, as if somehow to impress my grandfather with the importance of this event in society, “can’t you understand that the prisoner out there in the Square has broken away, has escaped, and at this minute is running down Main Street, and that he’s getting farther and farther away with each moment that you sit there?”
I had a vivid picture of the man running with long strides, in the soft dust of Main Street; he must even then, I fancied, be far down the street; he must indeed be down by Bailey’s, and perhaps Bailey’s dog was rushing out at him, barking. And I hoped he would run faster, and faster, and get away, though I felt it was wrong to hope this. Uncle John Brand seemed to be right; though I did not like him as I liked my grandfather.
“But how could he get away?” my grandfather was asking. “He was in irons.”
“He got the irons off somehow,” Uncle John Brand said, exasperated; “I don’t know how. He didn’t stop to explain!” He found a relief in this fine sarcasm, and then said:
“Aren’t you going to do anything?”
“Well,” said my grandfather, with an irresolution quite uncommon in him, “I suppose I really ought to do something. But I don’t know just what to do.” He sat up, and looked about all over the room. “You don’t see the marshal, do you?”
Uncle John Brand was looking at him now in disgust.
“Just look outside there, will you, John,” my grandfather went on, “and see if you can find him? If you do, send him in, and I’ll speak to him and have him go after the prisoner.”
Uncle John Brand of Kentucky stood a moment in the doorway, finding no words with which to express himself, and then went out. And when he had gone my grandfather leaned back in his chair and laughed and laughed; laughed until his ruddy face became much redder than it was even from the heat of that day.