Authors: William Maxwell
The friend who was closest to my Grandfather Blinn’s heart was Richard Oglesby. The two men were both of a speculative turn of mind, and among the things they loved to speculate on was the nature of life after death. They made a bargain that whichever one died first would make every effort in his power to inform the other of what he found. Since they were both lawyers, they also had that—they had the law in its theoretical aspects and as it was carried out in the courts—to argue about.
Though my grandfather’s sympathies were easily touched, his social ideas would not be considered enlightened today. He defended the Chicago and
Alton Railroad in a suit brought against it by the destitute family of a man who was run over and killed while picking up coal on the right of way. Governor Oglesby took exception to this and said that if my grandfather had no other way to keep his wife and children warm, he’d do what the dead man did. My grandfather insisted that the man was where he ought not to have been: that it was not a question of the sacredness of property but of the sacredness of the law.
Oglesby’s experience of life had been more varied than my grandfather’s. He was born in Kentucky, and orphaned at the age of eight. He came to Illinois when he was twelve, was apprenticed to a carpenter, and then worked on a farm and read law when he got a chance. He fought in the Mexican War, as a first lieutenant, and took part in the gold rush of 1849. Then he came back to Illinois and went into politics. “He raised the second regiment in the State, to suppress the Rebellion,” the
Logan County History
says, “and for gallantry was promoted to Major General.” He fought under Grant at Belmont and Fort Donelson and was severely wounded at Corinth. He was elected governor of Illinois three times and between the last two times he served a term in the United States Senate. One of his speeches, a rhapsodic prose poem on the wonder and glory of corn, was considered a literary masterpiece. He married a sister of Miss Jessie Gillett, who brought that picture of Caerlaverock Castle to my Grandfather Maxwell. With small town people, every story is part of some other story.
Since he took exception to my grandfather’s arguing the case for the railroad against the man who was killed picking up coal on the right of way, I feel free to question something he did—or, rather, something he didn’t do. On the fourth of May, 1886, during Oglesby’s third term as governor, a crowd of fifteen hundred people gathered in Haymarket Square, in Chicago, to demonstrate in favor of an
eight-hour working day. The demonstration was largely staged by a small group of anarchists. The police tried to disperse the meeting, a bomb exploded, and in the rioting that followed seven policemen and four other persons were killed and over a hundred were injured. Eight anarchist leaders were arrested and tried. Shaw and Oscar Wilde came to their defense, but Middle Westerners have never been impressed by, or even interested in, the opinion of foreigners. There was no evidence to connect any of the anarchists with throwing or with making the bomb, so they were convicted of inciting to violence. Oglesby was asked—the appeal was signed by Ingersoll, among others—to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, but he let the sentence stand. Public feeling was aroused to such a pitch that nobody wanted to be reminded that a man is legally innocent until he is proved guilty. Whether my grandfather’s belief in the sacredness of the law held firm I do not know. Four of the anarchists were hanged, one committed suicide in prison, and three were pardoned by Altgeld, in 1893, on the ground that the accused had not had a fair trial.
My grandfather was so fond of his friend that he built a room on his house for him. The carpenters hadn’t quite finished when Richard Oglesby died, and so it was never occupied by him. Neither did he report back to my grandfather how things were in the Afterlife. It was not his fault; he was taken by surprise. He lay down for a nap in the middle of the day and never woke up.
Though my mother had what is called pride of family, she was very much the same with everybody and let me discover for myself the broad categories that, in their ideas and manners, people tend to fall into. I would have had to be more than innocent, I’d have had to be exceedingly stupid not to be aware that her side of the family was totally different from my father’s. And whether I should have or not, I made comparisons. The two sides of the family were different physically, and in the way they dressed, and in their habits and houses, and even in their speech. My father never said “he don’t” but my Aunt Bert, who had an eye for beauty and some sense of what books are worth reading, did. My Grandmother Maxwell even went so far as to say “ain’t” (which is, of course, not the solecism we were taught in fifth grade to believe it was, but just old-fashioned). What they talked
about
was also totally different. And what they ate. When we had steak at home it was ritually broiled over the coals of the kitchen range by my father himself, and two inches thick, and rare. At my Aunt Maybel’s it was half an inch thick, fried in a pan, heavily peppered, dark brown, and tough. She served canned fruit and vegetables in the summertime, and no lunch or dinner was without a dish of pickles or some other form of relish.
The presents my mother’s sisters gave me at Christmas and for my birthday always went straight to the mark and inflamed me with excitement and pleasure. I did not even
bother to thank them. I knew they knew. My Aunt Maybel’s presents seemed meant for some other little boy, and I was conscious of insincerity as I thanked her for the gold ring that I did not like the feel of on my finger, or the dollar bill that did not seem to belong in the category of presents at all.
My Aunt Maybel was not indifferent to children, and managed to capture the hearts of two of them. She used to look at me with an expression that I am sure meant that she knew I was not as fond of her as I was of my mother’s sisters but that, even so, I was her nephew and this was not something I was going to squirm out of.
On one occasion when we’d been fishing and had very bad luck, I attempted a witty remark that brought my father’s wrath down on my head. The witty remarks of nine-year-old boys are seldom greeted with applause, in any case, and he was cross at not catching any fish. What I said was, “That’s what happens when you go fishing on Sunday.” And what he said was, “If that’s the way you feel, why don’t you go live with your Aunt Maybel.” I didn’t know then and I don’t know now how he really felt about her—whether he loved her but didn’t like certain aspects of her personality any more than I did, or just couldn’t bear her.
I don’t remember my mother’s ever being in the house on Union Street, but of course she was. Politeness demanded it from time to time, and so did consideration for my father’s feelings. She appears in several of the photographs of family reunions in my grandmother’s scrapbook, and is clearly and eloquently an outsider. I knew, without having to be told, that my mother did not like my Aunt Maybel, that my Aunt Maybel did not know this, and that it was a cat that must never be let out of the bag.
I decided at rather an early age that the Christian Church had something, or perhaps everything, to do with the way
my Grandmother Maxwell and my Aunt Maybel were. At children’s parties I was not very good at pinning the donkey’s tail on the place where nature intended it to be, but this time I was at least in the vicinity of the truth. And the truth itself was offered to me when my grandmother took me with her to the Willing Workers, a group of elderly women who met on Wednesdays in the bell tower of the church and, quilting together, helped pay off the mortgage as drops of water wear away stone. The gossip was of people I had never heard of, and when lunch time came, the old women astonished me by eating pie with their fingers. I didn’t know you could do this, and I enjoyed it very much. I even tried to introduce the practice at home. Eating pie with your fingers was a custom of country people. The Christian Church has never been as strong in cities as in small towns and hamlets, and every one of those old women undoubtedly grew up on a farm, like my grandmother. No farmer’s wife in the year 1912 would have found my Aunt Maybel’s cooking in the least strange. Though my aunt and my grandmother lived in town, in their manners and at heart, and above all in the way they were so sure about things that are surely open to doubt, they were country people.
Lincoln itself was a farming community, and owed its prosperity to the rich farmland that lay all around it. It was also a place that successful farmers retired to when they were ready to give up farming and spend their declining years at the Elks Club, playing rummy. And there were a certain number of men in Lincoln who, like my father, owned land which they kept a careful eye on and from which they derived a substantial part or even all of their income.
On hot August nights without a breath of air stirring anywhere, people sitting on porch swings said placidly, “Corn-growing weather,” and put up with the heat because sooner or later it meant money in the bank for everybody. The tenant farmers were certainly not exploited the way Mississippi
sharecroppers are; they lived in decent if bleak two-story houses, and had enough to eat, and when the wheat and corn and oats and alfalfa were sold, tenant and owner split fifty-fifty. My father kept his same tenants year after year, and his relations with them were cordial, but they never came to our house to dinner, and I never got to know any of their children.
On Saturday nights the farmers drove into town in their buckboard wagons, and I saw them roaming the courthouse square with unsmiling faces when we drove downtown for an ice cream soda. At that period, rising in the world meant giving up working with your hands in favor of work in a store or an office. The people who lived in town had made it, and turned their backs socially on those who had not but were still growing corn and wheat out there in the country. What seemed like an impassable gulf was only the prejudice of a single generation, which refused to remember its own not very remote past.
With its roots deep in the country and its ingrained suspicion of all forms of innovation, how could the Christian church turn its back on the people who lived by the labor of their hands, as everyone had in the past? At any rate, it didn’t.
On those occasions when I went to church with my grandmother, my Uncle Paul seemed to be rather conspicuously in charge of things. If he was, as I assume, an elder, then the other elders didn’t have a very easy time of it.
Looking at the pictures my aunt and uncle had taken at the time of their marriage, I think how could he have asked her to marry him—for she was not only a big woman, bigger than he was, but physically forbidding. Even in her twenties she looked like a grade-school principal, with tight lips and a heavy jaw and a pince-nez. And then I look at his picture—at the high-crowned derby hat set square on his round head,
and the badly tied necktie, and the amount of self-esteem concentrated in that face—and think how could she have accepted him? Couldn’t she see that the one thing in the world he could never do was admit he was wrong about anything? And since she was the same way, how could they hope to live together under the same roof? They met when they were students at Eureka College, and I wonder if perhaps they were the victims of some oversimplification—could he have married her because she was not attractive and therefore couldn’t be frivolous, and did she marry him because he didn’t smoke or drink or play cards?
I didn’t like him, but the dislike was not so strong that I was uncomfortable in his presence. I am tempted to say that he was a bigoted, bowlegged man from a very small town over by the Mississippi River and let it go at that. This snobbish statement is accurate as far as it goes, but it fails to do justice to my uncle’s peculiarities, as my father called them.
The two men actively disliked each other, from the beginning. My father was a boy in knee pants the first time he laid eyes on his future brother-in-law, at a baseball game at Eureka College. My uncle was playing on the college team, and my father mortified his sister to tears by saying, in a loud voice, “Maybel, your beau has bowlegs.” She wasn’t the only one who was mortified; my father did not care to be related even by marriage to somebody with legs like that! With closer acquaintance he found other qualities he could object to more.
Since all people reflect to a considerable degree their original environment, it seems safe to say that some of my uncle’s peculiarities would not have been considered peculiar in Augusta, Illinois, in the 1880’s, but I have never been there and do not know what it is like. My uncle was unique in Lincoln.
He did not frequent the Elks Club or get involved
in heated political arguments, or belong to a foursome at the Country Club, or sing barbershop chords. Or tell stories that began, “There were two Irishmen named Pat and Mike, and Pat says to Mike, he says, ‘Mike …’ ” Or swear. Or drink. The breath of scandal couldn’t get within a mile of him. He had none of the amiable vices, and no friends, so far as I know.
His laugh was unpleasant, and the shoulders of his suit were flecked with dandruff. Where another man, finding himself socially uneasy, would feel in his coat pockets for his pipe or cigarettes, my uncle would take out his penknife and pare his fingernails. There was also something odd about his shoes: They turned up at the end, in a way that nobody else’s did, and you could see the shape of his toes through the leather. He appeared to be perfectly satisfied with his own conduct, and did not hesitate to tell other people what he thought of theirs. They were invariably polite to him, realizing, perhaps, how cut off he was by the narrowness of his outlook. He remained in the same job for forty or fifty years. If he’d been incompetent he’d doubtless have been fired; and it must have been his unfortunate personality that kept him from being promoted.
My uncle did not invent the standards by which he so harshly judged people; they came down to him intact from the chief founder of the Disciples of Christ. Alexander Campbell’s idea of the works of the Devil may have been devoid of subtlety and unduly strait-laced and in some respects even absurd, but it was shared by a good number of his contemporaries. My uncle did not have this excuse; nor was he well-educated or blessed with anything like the intelligence of the founders of his church. He was a dutiful son to his own parents, and I never knew him to be disagreeable to my grandmother, though he was, on occasion, very disagreeable to my father and my Aunt Bert.
He and my Aunt Maybel bickered continually about questions of fact—about whether it was on Tuesday or Wednesday that it rained. I was so accustomed to this it didn’t occur to me (and anyway, it isn’t the sort of thing children think of) that below the surface of the argument there was a more serious incompatibility. Though he called her “Babe,” it appears, from things my father said over the years, that they did not like each other and that toward the end of their life together the dislike turned to hatred. I would be tempted now to conclude that the incompatibility was sexual except that it was a period in which the very idea of sexual compatibility was unthinkable, and people who indulged in it sooner or later had to leave town.