Hatchment

by Jesse Halsey

“They heard not the voice of Him that spake to me.”

{Jack Gardner [is a] soldier who joins church on return because of sunset experience; boy at the wood-pile.}

Hog—swine

Pig—Pork

Cow—beef

Hash—Popui; Webster in one of his definitions of hash, frankly says “A mess.”

Not to tarry over definition—a best this is, but popui—with sauce or without, a hash of experience. No horse meat, we trust—though we can testify it’s not so bad when you don’t know it. We had a sausage factory improvised in Siberia during the War, supposedly and actually we used reindeer meat, but I have a suspicion that ex cavalry equines go in at times, rabbits (arctic hares that is), and when one is skun a mongrel Eskimo dog looks just the same and if you don’t know it—tastes the same or similar. (I have eaten snakes in Japan, didn’t know the difference, thinking they were eels—which I catch thru the ice on Long Island, skin and fry—a delectable morsel.)

Why this dietetic metaphor—I can’t say; we started with hash. And this is just a sample here and there out of an oldster’s reminiscences of things grave and gay; res sacra and res secularia, unrelated likely to any logic, but tied into the stream of life for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, till death doth part soul and body and memory fades out of fructifies into heavenly harvest—or hellish (most hells of any gripping reality to men since Dante are constructed of memories).

But to get on; or rather to go back. Some one asked Duncan Spaeth, coach of the Princeton Crew why it was that rowing was his favorite sport—“Only thing I know where by looking back you can get ahead.” (Parenthesis, no two. The very time that Henry Ford called all history “bunk” he, nonetheless, was putting little concave mirrors on the front of the drivers [side] so he could see the road behind; that’s the only way to drive safely to at least glance on the road behind.)

With this recurring justification or alibi or reminiscence, we start again. A new England kitchen, big fireplace, brick oven, Saturday night and baked beans and brown bread. A red damask spic and span table cloth on a square walnut table; four persons seated. Kerosene lamp, flickers from the smoldering fireplace; the lazy hum of the tea kettle, now that the tea is brewed. A boy maybe twelve, and his older sister back to the wall, facing the fire; bewildered father at one end of the table, elderly aunt at the other.

Melvina Terry Halsey, 1842-1887

Father seemed old to the boy whose mother was dead, he himself as one born out of due time; father seemed old, he was old, looked old, felt old (rheumatism; its antidote a jug of hard cider with whittlings of barberry in it; the boy often went a mile down the lane to Uncle Harvey's barberry for twigs and bark for the decoction). Mother had died, quite young, when boy was five or less; father lived ever under its shadow; older sisters always thought that if father had been less stubborn (loyal) and had the new doctor who had come fresh from Ann Arbor and never lost a case of pneumonia, likely mother would have lived--who knows.

Aunt Gussie’s (her husband father's brother, she was mother's sister) husband, Uncle Will, our favorite out of a baker's dozen, at least, of uncles, had taken the boy, od six, his adult brother (and a neighbor's boy of five—Lewis Hildreth—on a clamming expedition. One horse box wagon, two wash tubs with ropes attached and down to Sebonac "gut" where the tide cuts in and out between the big bay and the cold spring, scallop bond—Ram Island and other ramifying creeks. (They say cricks down east, our way.) . . .

The men go out on the flats and beyond, the crop is plentiful and the tubs soon filled—a long hour or so—the boys play on the shore, shells and stones in many shapes and colors collected and arranged, and houses built and paddling in the lapping wash of the tiny waves; swimming lessons will come later when the men get back. Uncle Will is nearing the shore, crossing the channel, when he throws up his hands and flounders in the tide rip. The boys think he is playing a trick to amuse them. (He was always up to making them laugh—our favorite uncle.) He goes down “for the third time” as the saying goes and Lewis says (I can hear his lisp now), “I guess he’s gone down to look for his hat.” Alarmed, they begin to run up and down the beach wafting their coats like the old folks do when they sight a whale, shouting till finally Harry comes slowly thru the teeming water but fast he can, reaching the flat he kicks off the tub handle half of it, thus free from the rope and tub he plunges in the deep water of the gut and though the tide has carried tub and body far into the inlet he reaches the tub, now empty, tied to uncle Will and brings the body to the shore; the boys following the shoreline come to the place and stand helpless by while Harry rolls the body on the tub trying to extract the water from the lungs. (No Red Cross training in those days; only sailor’s methods.) Some furtive clam diggers from another township across the bay whose sloop is hidden behind Ram Island, hearing the boys’ shouts finally come and they and Harry work on half an hour without avail. The boy hears his brother now, across the intervening half century plus, as Harry lifts our uncle’s lifeless body into the one horse farm wagon, carefully bedded with dry seaweed from the shore—a fitting coach for an old whaler, but still (brothers sob) it seems inappropriate for a man just entering middle life. The long slow drive home, Harry and the boys on the seat, the body in the wagon shrouded in the horse blanket. The boys eat the lunch—wondering why Harry doesn’t. (They were six and five.) We stop at the first house from the shore and tell Cap’n ‘Lias (White), he saddles his horse and rides to the village to find Father, who like the elder brother of the parable only in this one regard was “in the field,” after going to tell his sister-in-law and her daughter, joins us at the foot of the lane as we come up to the house.

No professional morticians in those days—not there at least—and old Aunt Libbie who had ushered us all into the world and our parents before us—Aunt Libbie takes over. The boy at her direction goes across the street to Father’s barn to show the men where to find the rough pine plank 48’’ x 6’ on which his mother had been “laid out” some months before; stored up there in the hay mow (the east end where a great round shiny ships spar tied the hand hewn oak rafters together. What a job for a boy—or boys, for “Little Lewis” went along, too. (He died the next year.) But that’s another story; we wander too far; let’s get back to the kitchen table. There are shadows in the room you see; not of westerning sun’s making for the flicker of the fireplace logs—Father at one end of the table, Aunt Gussie at the other, going their best for the others’ sake to be cheerful.

. . . No levity; but much wisdom in the meagre conversation. Meagre is the gossip ("Gossip" says father, who studies the dictionary and knew his Latin from Academy days, "'Gossip' was once a good word akin to Gospel"--let's make it that and when some really unpleasant sure enough bit of unsavory morsel of truth filtered in, Father would say, "As Biney (his wife, my mother) used to say, 'Maye, for we all have a crook in the elbow.'" Then he would add as was his Scriptural custom, "Charity covereth a multitude of sins."