Fathers & Brothers

"In the fullness of time the old gentleman slept with his fathers and the little boy grew up, as little boys will."  --Reverend Jesse Halsey

from The Quick and the Dead c 1931

Then through the hills of the T.B. country, many couples, who are taking the cure, are out walking at the close of the day (I know something about the process, a brother and a sister having gone through it, one successfully).

from One Extra Curriculum or Adventures in Overalls c 1934

I am now, and have been for twenty years, the minister of a God fearing congregation that quite often wears dinner jackets. Needless to say, I don’t wear overalls in the pulpit. But they are, I rather think, thanks to my father, a symbol of my philosophy of life. My ancestors were sea-faring men, chasing whales from Kamchatka to Palmer Land. They sailed the seven seas. I have had to make my adventure nearer home, and these are a sample of some of the interesting things that have happened.

*** 

All but ready for college; hard work on the farm, day after day, through a long, hot summer. Father was often sick and my older brother an almost chronic invalid. I was working nights to get off a college entrance exam in German. Then came the uncertainty as to the possibility of going—one day going, the next, staying. Finally, a week before school was to open, everyone was better and college seemed assured. [1899?] Saturday, September 16, “going.” Sunday, the 17^th, “going tomorrow at 7:15 A. M.” “Monday, the 18^th.” Up at four in the morning and into overalls to milk for the last time and drive the cows to pasture. Then, a bath, a new suit, breakfast, the train, two ferries, another train, Princeton! All set to go! But came 6 A.M., there were no family prayers. “Father’s sick.” My older brother called me to his bed. “I don’t see how we can spare you. Go, if you think you ought (hard word to a New England conscience). We’ll find the money and get on somehow.

“If you ought?”= “If you can?” A long moment of terrific struggle, then up the stairs, back into overalls, down the lane behind the white horses (or their successors) and as the long, brown furrow turned ‘ere the train goes by, and I waved to the fellow who was supposed to be my roommate.

Then, for four years it was overalls all day and books at night; work, hard work, that made a boy into a man. Sickness at home, long painful days, tedious, painful nights, watching and crude nursing; learning, learning things not found in books, learning, so that, automatically, as one says 6 x 6, duty stands before pleasure and the days of work and nights of broken sleep, reading, study snatched here and there, with correspondence courses and a few weeks now and then in the winter, at the college, result in a body hard as nails, needing little sleep, splendid health and happy heart withal—work had become joy. The inoculation had become successful.

My brother died. I assumed the farm responsibility. Some crops failed, others succeeded (more of the former), and gradually I worked out my own schemes, sometimes with my father’s approbation and sometimes without. (But he always paid the bills.) I was handy with tools, so plumbing found its way into the old farmhouse, also steam heat and electric lights. Winter days laying hardwood floors. (Now I wish the old wide pine and oak floorboards worn by the feet of many grandmothers, were back.) New roofs, better stables, sheds, etc., were made possible by an overall ability inherited from my grandfather. My father, until the last years of his life, never had five hundred dollars in cash in any one year, but we lived well on what we raised, and traded produce for groceries and dry goods—of actual cash there was very little.

from Memoir: Section One, p. 14 c 1952

After mother died (when I was five) father took on the heavy responsibility of doing all that he could to take her place. He spent his evenings reading to me and telling me stories. I was with him constantly as he drove to the farm about half a mile removed from our barn and farm house. I followed him about his work and I imagined furnished him some small measure of companionship that he missed in mother's going. He was devoted to her memory and twenty years afterward I have come upon him at night kneeling at his bedside looking at her picture and pouring out his heart.