<h2><SPAN name="XII" id="XII"></SPAN>XII</h2>
<h3>"'A Babbled of Green Fields"</h3>
<p>Our town is set upon a hillside, rising from a prairie stream. Forty
years ago the stream ran through a thick woodland nearly a mile wide,
and in the woodland were stately elms, spreading walnut trees, shapely
oaks, gaunt white sycamores, and straight, bushy hackberries, that shook
their fruit upon the ice in spots least frequented by skaters. Along the
draws that emptied into the stream were pawpaw trees, with their tender
foliage, and their soft wood, which little boys delighted to cut for
stick horses. Beneath all these trees grew a dense underbrush of
buckeyes, blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and little red winter
berries called Indian beads by the children. Wild grapevines, "poison"
grapes, and ivies of both kinds wove the woods into a mass of summer
green. In the clearings and bordering the wood grew the sumach, that
flared red at the very thought of Jack Frost's coming. In these woods
the boys of our town—many of whom have been dead these twenty
years—used to lay their traps for the monsters of the forest, and
trudged back from the timber before breakfast, in winter, bringing home
redbirds, and rabbits and squirrels. Sometimes a particularly doughty
woodsman would report that there were wildcat tracks about his trap; but
none of us ever saw a wildcat, though Enoch Haver, whose father's father
had heard a wildcat scream, and had taught the boy its cry, would hide
in a hollow sycamore and screech until the little boys were terrified
and would not go alone to their traps for days. In summer, boys, usually
from the country, or from a neighbouring town, caught 'coons, and
dragged them chained through alleys for our boys to see, and 'Dory Paine
had an owl which was widely sought by other boys in the circus and
menagerie line. The boys of our town in that day seemed to live in the
wood and around the long millpond, though little fellows were afraid
that lurking Indians or camping gypsies might steal them—a boy's
superstition, which experience has proved too good to be true. They
fared forth to the riffle below the dam, which deepens in the shade
under the water elm; this was the pool known as "baby hole," despised of
the ten-year-olds, who plunged into the deepest of the thicket and came
out at the limekiln, where all day long one might hear "so-deep,
so-deep, so-deep," and "go-round, go-round, go-round," until school
commenced in the fall. Then the rattle of little homemade wagons, and
the shrilling of boy voices might be heard all over the wilderness, and
the black-stained hands of schoolboys told of the day of the walnut
harvest. It was nearly a mile from the schoolhouse to the woods, and yet
on winter afternoons no school-ma'am could keep the boys from using
school hours to dig out the screw-holes and heel-plates of their boots
before wadding them with paper. At four o'clock a troop of boys would
burst forth from that schoolhouse so wildly that General Durham of the
<i>Statesman</i>, whose office we used to pass with a roar, always looked up
from his work to say: "Well, I see hell's out for noon again."</p>
<p>In the spring the boys fished, and on Saturdays go, up the river or
down, or on either side, where one would, one was never out of sight of
some thoughtful boy, sitting either on a stump or on a log stretching
into the stream, or squatting on a muddy bank with his worm can beside
him, throwing a line into the deep, green, quiet water. Always it was to
the woods one went to find a lost boy, for the brush was alive with
fierce pirates, and blood-bound brother-hoods, and gory Indian fighters,
and dauntless scouts. Under the red clay banks that rose above the
sluggish stream, robbers' caves, and treasure houses, and freebooters'
dens, were filled with boys who, five days in the week and six hours a
day, could "<i>amo amas amat, amamus amatus amant</i>" with the best of them.
On Sundays these same boys sat with trousers creeping above the wrinkles
at the ankles of their copper-toed, red-topped boots, recited golden
texts, sang "When He Cometh," and while planning worse for their own
little brothers, read with much virtuous indignation of little Joseph's
wicked brothers, who put him in a pit. After Sunday School was over
these highly respected young persons walked sedately in their best
clothes over the scenes of their Saturday crimes.</p>
<p>They say the woods are gone now. Certainly the trees have been cut away
and the underbrush burned; cornfields cover the former scenes of
valorous achievement; but none the less the woods are there; each nook
and cranny is as it was, despite the cornfields. Scattered about the sad
old earth live men who could walk blindfolded over the dam, across the
millrace, around the bend, through the pawpaw patch to the grapevine
home of the "Slaves of the Magic Tree;" who could find their trail under
the elder bushes in Boswell's ravine, though they should come—as they
often come—at the dead of night from great cities and from mountain
camps and from across seas, and fore-gather there, in the smoke and dirt
of the rendezvous to eat their unsalted sacrificial rabbit. They can
follow the circuitous route around John Betts's hog lot, to avoid the
enemy, as easily to-day as they could before the axe and the fire and
the plough made their fine pretence of changing the landscape. And when
Joe Nevison gets ready to signal them from his seat high in the crotch
of the oak tree across the creek, the "Slaves of the Tree" will come and
obey their leader. They say that the tree is gone, and that Joe is gone,
but we know better; for at night, when the Tree has called us, and we
hear the notes from the pumpkin-stem reed, we come and sit in the
branches beneath him and plan our raids and learn our passwords, and
swear our vengeance upon such as cross our pathway. There may have been
a time when men thought the Slaves of the Tree were disbanded; indeed it
did seem so, but as the years go by, one by one they come wandering
back, take their places in the branches of the magic tree, swing far out
over the world like birds, and summon again the <i>genius loci</i> who has
slept for nearly forty years.</p>
<p>Of course we knew that Joe would be the first one back; he didn't care
what they said—even then; he registered his oath that it made no
difference what they did to him or what the others did, he would never
desert the Tree. He commanded all of us to come back; if not by day then
to gather in the moonlight and bring our chicken for the altar and our
eggs for the ceremony, and he promised that he would be there. We were
years and years in obeying Joe Nevison. Many of us have had long
journeys to go; and some of us lead little children by the hand as we
creep up the hollow, crawl through the gooseberry bushes, and 'coon the
log over the chasm to our meeting place. But we are nearly all there
now; and in the moonlight, when the corn seems to be waving over a wide
field, a tree springs up as by magic and we take our places again as of
old.</p>
<p>Many years have passed since Marshal Furgeson stood those seven Slaves
of the Magic Tree in line before the calaboose door and made them
surrender the feathered cork apple-stealers and the sacred chicken
hooks. In those years many terrors have ridden the boys who have gone
out into the world to fight its dragons and grapple with its gorgons;
but never have those boys felt any happiness so sweet as that which
rested on their hearts when they heard the Marshal say, "Now you boys
run on home—but mind you if I ever——" and he never did—except Joe
Nevison. Once it was for boring a hole in the depot platform and
tapping a barrel of cider; once it was for going through a window in the
Hustler hardware store and taking a box of pocketknives and two
revolvers, with which to reward his gang, and finally, when the boy was
in the midst of his teens, for breaking into the schoolhouse and burning
the books. Joe's father always bought him off, as fathers always can buy
boys off, when mothers go to the offended person and promise, and beg,
and weep. So Joe Nevison grew up the town bad boy—defiant of law,
reckless and unrestrained, with the blood of border ruffianism in his
veins and the scorn of God and man and the love of sin in his heart. The
week after he left town, and before he was twenty, his father paid for
"Red" Martin's grey race horse, which disappeared the night Joe's bed
was found empty. In those days the Nevisons had more money than most of
the people in our town, but as the years went by they began to lose
their property, and it was said that it went in great slices to Joe, to
keep him out of the penitentiary.</p>
<p>We knew that Joe Nevison was in the West. People from our town, who seem
to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge
City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona—wherever there
was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose
business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival
towns; sometimes he was a free lance—living the devil knows how—always
dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide
felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say
that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of
his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him
adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a
mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who
rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town
when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then
appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with
music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or
winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his
twenties—a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he
passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on
the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too
effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could
not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass,
seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote
and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided
ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a
lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could
prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band
of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States
marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was
established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better
and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people
saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys—the
old boys he called them—and becoming possessed of a post-office
address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our
office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe
being in an expansive mood, and with more money on his clothes than he
cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had
borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter
in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a
regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George
Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy,
story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and
into a shy old bachelor who wept over "East Lynne" whenever it came to
the town opera house, and asked for a lay-off only when Modjeska
appeared in Topeka, or when there was grand opera at Kansas City. But he
ruled the back office with an iron hand and superintended the Mission
Sunday-School across the track, putting all his spare money into
Christmas presents for his pupils. After that first letter that came
from Joe Nevison, no one had a hint of what passed between the two men.
But a month never went by that Joe's letter missed. When Lawton began
to wane, Joe Nevison seemed to mend his wayward course. He moved to
South McAlester and opened a faro game—a square game they said it
was—for the Territory! This meant that unless Joe was hard up every man
had his chance before the wheel. Old George took the longest trip of his
life, when we got him a pass to South McAlester and he put on his black
frock coat and went to visit Joe. All that we learned from him was that
Joe "had changed a good deal," and that he was "taking everything in the
drug store, from the big green bottle at the right of the front door
clear around past the red prescription case, and back to the big blue
bottle at the left of the door." But after George came home the Mission
Sunday-School began to thrive. George was not afraid of tainted money,
and the school got a new library, which included "Tom Sawyer" and
"Huckleberry Finn," as well as "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" for
the boys, and all the "Pansy" books for the girls. It was a quaint old
lot of books, and George Kirwin was nearly a year getting it together.
Also he bought a new stove for his Sunday-School room, and a lot of
pictures for the church walls, among others "Wide Awake and Fast
Asleep," "Simply to Thy Cross," and "The Old Oaken Bucket." He gave to
the school a cabinet organ with more stops than most of the children
could count.</p>
<hr style="width: 45%;" />
<div class="figcenter"> <SPAN name="gs12" id="gs12"></SPAN> <ANTIMG src="images/gs12.jpg" alt=""/></div>
<h3>A desert Scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it</h3>
<hr style="width: 45%;" />
<p>A year ago a new reporter brought in this item: "Joseph Nevison, of
South McAlester, I. T., is visiting his mother, Mrs. Julia Nevison, at
234 South Fifth Street."</p>
<p>We sent the reporter out for more about Joe Nevison and at noon George
Kirwin hurried down to the little home below the tracks. From these two
searchers after truth we learned that Joe Nevison's mother had brought
him home from the Indian Territory mortally sick. Half-a-dozen of us who
had played with him as boys went to see him that evening, and found a
wan, haggard man with burned-out black eyes, lying in a clean white bed.
He seemed to know each of us for a moment and spoke to us through his
delirium in a tired, piping voice—like the voice of the little boy who
had been our leader. He called us by forgotten nicknames, and he hummed
at a tune that we had not heard for a score of years. Then he piped out
"While the Landlubbers Lie Down Below, Below, Below," and followed that
with "Green Grass Growing all Around, all Around," and that with the
song about the "Tonga Islands," his voice growing into a clearer alto as
he sang. His mother tried to quiet him, but he smiled his dead smile at
her through his cindery eyes, shook his head and went on. When he had
lain quiet for a moment, he turned to one of us and said: "Dock, I'm
goin' up and dive off that stump—a back flip-flop—you dassent!" Pretty
soon he seemed to come up snuffing and blowing and grinning and said,
"Last man dressed got to chaw beef." Then he cried: "Dock's it—Dock's
it; catch 'im, hold him—there he goes—duck him, strip him. O well, let
him go if he's go'n' to cry. Say, boys, I wish you fellers'd come over
t' my stick horse livery stable—honest I got the best hickory horse you
ever see. Whoa, there—whoa now, I tell you. You Pilliken Dunlevy let me
harness you; there, put it under your arm, and back of your neck—no I
ain't go'n' to let you hold it—I'll jerk the tar out of you if you
don't go. Whe-e-e that's the way to go, hol—hold on, whoa there. Back
up. Let's go over to Jim's and run on his track. Say, Jim, I got the
best little pacer in the country here—get up there, Pilliken," and he
clucked and sawed his arms, and cracked an imaginary whip. When George
came in, the face on the bed brightened and the treble voice said:
"Hello Fatty—we've been waitin' for you. Now let's go on. What you got
in your wagon—humph—bet it's a pumpkin. Did old Boswell chase you?"
and then he laughed, and turned away from us. His trembling hands seemed
to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver,
and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we
saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice
broke forth: "Me first—first up—get away from here, Dock—I said
first," and we could see his hands climbing an imaginary tree.</p>
<p>His face glowed with the excitement of his delirium as he climbed, and
then apparently catching his breath he rested before he called out: "I'm
comin' down, clear the track for old Dan Tucker," and from the
convulsive gripping of his hands and arms and the hysterical intake of
his breath we who had seen Joe Nevison dive from the top of the old
tree, from limb to limb to the bottom, knew what he was doing. His heart
was thumping audibly when he finished, and we tried to calm him. For a
while we all sat about him in silence—forgetting the walls that shut us
in, and living with him in the open, Slaves of the Magic Tree. Then one
by one we left and only George Kirwin stayed with the sick man.</p>
<p>Joe Nevison had lived a wicked life. He had been the friend and
companion of vile men and the women whom such men choose, and they had
lived lives such as we in our little town only read about—and do not
understand. Yet all that night Joe Nevison roamed through the woods by
the creek, a little child, and no word passed his lips that could have
brought a hint of the vicious life that his manhood had known.</p>
<p>In that long night, while George Kirwin sat by his dying friend,
listening to his babble, two men were in the genii's hands. They put off
their years as a garment. Together they ran over the roofs of buildings
on Main Street that have been torn down for thirty years; they played
in barns and corncribs burned down so long ago that their very site is
in doubt; they romped over prairies where now are elm-covered streets;
and they played with boys and girls who have lain forgotten in little
sunken graves for a quarter of a century, out on the hill; or they
called from the four winds of heaven playmates who left our town at a
time so remote that to the watcher by the bed it seemed ages ago. The
games they played were of another day than this. When Joe began crying
"Barbaree," he summoned a troop of ghosts, and the pack went scampering
through the spectre town in the starlight; and when that game had tired
him the voice began to chatter of "Slap-and-a-kick," and
"Foot-and-a-half," and of "Rolly-poley," and of the ball games—"Scrub,"
and "Town-ball," and "Anteover," each old game conjuring up spirits from
its own vasty deep until the room was full of phantoms and the watcher's
memory ached with the sweet sorrow of old joys.</p>
<p>George Kirwin says that long after midnight Joe awakened from a doze,
fumbling through the bedclothes, looking for something. Finally he
complained that he could not find his mouth-harp. They tried to make him
forget it, but when they failed, his mother went to the bureau and
pulling open the lower drawer found a little varnished box; under the
shaded lamp she brought out a sack of marbles, a broken bean-shooter,
with whittled prongs, a Barlow knife, a tintype picture of a boy, and
the mouth-organ. This she gave to the hands that fluttered about the
face on the pillow. He began to play "The Mocking Bird," opening and
shutting his bony hands to let the music rise and fall. When he closed
that tune he played "O the Mistletoe Bough," and after that over and
over again he played "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." When he dropped
the mouth-harp, he lay very still for a time, though his lips moved
incessantly. The morning was coming, and he was growing weak. But when
his voice came back they knew that he was far afield again; for he said,
"Come on, fellers, let's set down here under the hill and rest. It's a
long ways back." When he had rested he spoke up again, "Say, fellers,
what'll we sing?" George tried him with a gospel hymn, but Joe would
have none of it, and reviled the song and the singer after the fashion
of boys. In a moment he exclaimed: "Here—listen to me. Let's sing
this," and his alto voice came out uncertainly and faintly: "Wrap Me up
in My Tarpaulin Jacket."</p>
<p>George Kirwin's rough voice joined the song and the mother listened and
wept. Other old songs followed, but Joe Nevison, the man, never woke up.
It was the little boy full of the poetry and sweetness of a child at
play, the boy who had turned the poetry of his boyish soul into a life
of adventure unchecked by moral restraint, whose eyes they closed that
morning.</p>
<p>And George Kirwin explained to us when he came down to work that
afternoon, that maybe the bad part of Joe Nevison's soul had shrivelled
away during his sickness, instead of waiting for death. George told us
that what made him sad was that a soul in which there was so much that
might have been good had been stunted by life and was entering eternity
with so little to show for its earthly journey.</p>
<p>When one considers it, one finds that Joe Nevison wasted his life most
miserably. There was nothing to his credit to say in his obituary—no
good deed to recount and there were many, many bad ones. Moreover, the
sorrow and bitterness that he brought into his father's last days, and
the shame that he put upon his mother, who lived to see his end, made it
impossible for our paper to say of him any kind thing that would not
have seemed maudlin.</p>
<p>Yet at Joe Nevison's funeral the old settlers, many of them broken in
years and by trouble, gathered at the little wooden church in the hollow
below the track, to see the last of him, though certainly not to pay him
a tribute of respect. They remembered him as the little boy who had
trudged up the hill to school when the old stone schoolhouse was the
only stone building in town; they remembered him as he was in the days
when he began to turn Marshal Furgeson's hair grey with wild pranks.
They remembered the boy's childish virtues, and could feel the remorse
that must at times have gnawed his heart. Also these old men and women
knew of the devil of unbridled passion that the child's father had put
into Joe's blood. And when he started down the broad road they had seen
his track beyond him. So as the little gathering of old people filed
through the church door and lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the
mourners to come out, we heard through the crowd white haired men
sighing: "Poor Joe; poor fellow." Can one hope that God's forgiveness
will be fuller than that!</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />
1 of 2
2 of 2
Previous
Next
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.