Poor White: Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Bidwell, Ohio, was an old town as the ages of towns go in the Central West,
long before Hugh McVey, in his search for a place where he could penetrate
the wall that shut him off from humanity, went there to live and to try
to work out his problem. It is a busy manufacturing town now and has a
population of nearly a hundred thousand people; but the time for the
telling of the story of its sudden and surprising growth has not yet come.

From the beginning Bidwell has been a prosperous place. The town lies in
the valley of a deep, rapid-flowing river that spreads out just above the
town, becomes for the time wide and shallow, and goes singing swiftly along
over stones. South of the town the river not only spreads out, but the
hills recede. A wide flat valley stretches away to the north. In the days
before the factories came the land immediately about town was cut up into
small farms devoted to fruit and berry raising, and beyond the area of
small farms lay larger tracts that were immensely productive and that
raised huge crops of wheat, corn, and cabbage.

When Hugh was a boy sleeping away his days in the grass beside his father's
fishing shack by the Mississippi River, Bidwell had already emerged out of
the hardships of pioneer days. On the farms that lay in the wide valley to
the north the timber had been cut away and the stumps had all been rooted
out of the ground by a generation of men that had passed. The soil was easy
to cultivate and had lost little of its virgin fertility. Two railroads,
the Lake Shore and Michigan Central--later a part of the great New York
Central System--and a less important coal-carrying road, called the
Wheeling and Lake Erie, ran through the town. Twenty-five hundred people
lived then in Bidwell. They were for the most part descendants of the
pioneers who had come into the country by boat through the Great Lakes or
by wagon roads over the mountains from the States of New York and
Pennsylvania.

The town stood on a sloping incline running up from the river, and the Lake
Shore and Michigan Central Railroad had its station on the river bank at
the foot of Main Street. The Wheeling Station was a mile away to the north.
It was to be reached by going over a bridge and along a piked road that
even then had begun to take on the semblance of a street. A dozen houses
had been built facing Turner's Pike and between these were berry fields and
an occasional orchard planted to cherry, peach or apple trees. A hard path
went down to the distant station beside the road, and in the evening this
path, wandering along under the branches of the fruit trees that extended
out over the farm fences, was a favorite walking place for lovers.

The small farms lying close about the town of Bidwell raised berries that
brought top prices in the two cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, reached by
its two railroads, and all of the people of the town who were not engaged
in one of the trades--in shoe making, carpentry, horse shoeing, house
painting or the like--or who did not belong to the small merchant and
professional classes, worked in summer on the land. On summer mornings,
men, women and children went into the fields. In the early spring when
planting went on and all through late May, June and early July when berries
and fruit began to ripen, every one was rushed with work and the streets
of the town were deserted. Every one went to the fields. Great hay wagons
loaded with children, laughing girls, and sedate women set out from Main
Street at dawn. Beside them walked tall boys, who pelted the girls with
green apples and cherries from the trees along the road, and men who went
along behind smoking their morning pipes and talking of the prevailing
prices of the products of their fields. In the town after they had gone a
Sabbath quiet prevailed. The merchants and clerks loitered in the shade of
the awnings before the doors of the stores, and only their wives and the
wives of the two or three rich men in town came to buy and to disturb their
discussions of horse racing, politics and religion.

In the evening when the wagons came home, Bidwell awoke. The tired berry
pickers walked home from the fields in the dust of the roads swinging their
dinner pails. The wagons creaked at their heels, piled high with boxes of
berries ready for shipment. In the stores after the evening meal crowds
gathered. Old men lit their pipes and sat gossiping along the curbing at
the edge of the sidewalks on Main Street; women with baskets on their arms
did the marketing for the next day's living; the young men put on stiff
white collars and their Sunday clothes, and girls, who all day had been
crawling over the fields between the rows of berries or pushing their way
among the tangled masses of raspberry bushes, put on white dresses and
walked up and down before the men. Friendships begun between boys and girls
in the fields ripened into love. Couples walked along residence streets
under the trees and talked with subdued voices. They became silent and
embarrassed. The bolder ones kissed. The end of the berry picking season
brought each year a new outbreak of marriages to the town of Bidwell.

In all the towns of mid-western America it was a time of waiting. The
country having been cleared and the Indians driven away into a vast distant
place spoken of vaguely as the West, the Civil War having been fought and
won, and there being no great national problems that touched closely their
lives, the minds of men were turned in upon themselves. The soul and its
destiny was spoken of openly on the streets. Robert Ingersoll came to
Bidwell to speak in Terry's Hall, and after he had gone the question of
the divinity of Christ for months occupied the minds of the citizens. The
ministers preached sermons on the subject and in the evening it was talked
about in the stores. Every one had something to say. Even Charley Mook, who
dug ditches, who stuttered so that not a half dozen people in town could
understand him, expressed his opinion.

In all the great Mississippi Valley each town came to have a character of
its own, and the people who lived in the towns were to each other like
members of a great family. The individual idiosyncrasies of each member of
the great family stood forth. A kind of invisible roof beneath which every
one lived spread itself over each town. Beneath the roof boys and girls
were born, grew up, quarreled, fought, and formed friendships with their
fellows, were introduced into the mysteries of love, married, and became
the fathers and mothers of children, grew old, sickened, and died.

Within the invisible circle and under the great roof every one knew his
neighbor and was known to him. Strangers did not come and go swiftly and
mysteriously and there was no constant and confusing roar of machinery and
of new projects afoot. For the moment mankind seemed about to take time to
try to understand itself.

In Bidwell there was a man named Peter White who was a tailor and worked
hard at his trade, but who once or twice a year got drunk and beat his
wife. He was arrested each time and had to pay a fine, but there was a
general understanding of the impulse that led to the beating. Most of the
women knowing the wife sympathized with Peter. "She is a noisy thing and
her jaw is never still," the wife of Henry Teeters, the grocer, said to her
husband. "If he gets drunk it's only to forget he's married to her. Then
he goes home to sleep it off and she begins jawing at him. He stands it as
long as he can. It takes a fist to shut up that woman. If he strikes her
it's the only thing he can do."

Allie Mulberry the half-wit was one of the highlights of life in the town.
He lived with his mother in a tumble-down house at the edge of town on
Medina Road. Beside being a half-wit he had something the matter with his
legs. They were trembling and weak and he could only move them with great
difficulty. On summer afternoons when the streets were deserted, he hobbled
along Main Street with his lower jaw hanging down. Allie carried a large
club, partly for the support of his weak legs and partly to scare off dogs
and mischievous boys. He liked to sit in the shade with his back against a
building and whittle, and he liked to be near people and have his talent as
a whittler appreciated. He made fans out of pieces of pine, long chains of
wooden beads, and he once achieved a singular mechanical triumph that won
him wide renown. He made a ship that would float in a beer bottle half
filled with water and laid on its side. The ship had sails and three tiny
wooden sailors who stood at attention with their hands to their caps in
salute. After it was constructed and put into the bottle it was too large
to be taken out through the neck. How Allie got it in no one ever knew. The
clerks and merchants who crowded about to watch him at work discussed the
matter for days. It became a never-ending wonder among them. In the evening
they spoke of the matter to the berry pickers who came into the stores,
and in the eyes of the people of Bidwell Allie Mulberry became a hero. The
bottle, half-filled with water and securely corked, was laid on a cushion
in the window of Hunter's Jewelry Store. As it floated about on its own
little ocean crowds gathered to look at it. Over the bottle was a sign with
the words--"Carved by Allie Mulberry of Bidwell"--prominently displayed.
Below these words a query had been printed. "How Did He Get It Into The
Bottle?" was the question asked. The bottle stayed in the window for months
and merchants took the traveling men who visited them, to see it. Then they
escorted their guests to where Allie, with his back against the wall of a
building and his club beside him, was at work on some new creation of the
whittler's art. The travelers were impressed and told the tale abroad.
Allie's fame spread to other towns. "He has a good brain," the citizen of
Bidwell said, shaking his head. "He don't appear to know very much, but
look what he does! He must be carrying all sorts of notions around inside
of his head."

Jane Orange, widow of a lawyer, and with the single exception of Thomas
Butterworth, a farmer who owned over a thousand acres of land and lived
with his daughter on a farm a mile south of town, the richest person in
town, was known to every one in Bidwell, but was not liked. She was called
stingy and it was said that she and her husband had cheated every one with
whom they had dealings in order to get their start in life. The town ached
for the privilege of doing what they called "bringing them down a peg."
Jane's husband had once been the Bidwell town attorney and later had
charge of the settlement of an estate belonging to Ed Lucas, a farmer who
died leaving two hundred acres of land and two daughters. The farmer's
daughters, every one said, "came out at the small end of the horn," and
John Orange began to grow rich. It was said he was worth fifty thousand
dollars. All during the latter part of his life the lawyer went to the city
of Cleveland on business every week, and when he was at home and even in
the hottest weather he went about dressed in a long black coat. When she
went to the stores to buy supplies for her house Jane Orange was watched
closely by the merchants. She was suspected of carrying away small articles
that could be slipped into the pockets of her dress. One afternoon in
Toddmore's grocery, when she thought no one was looking, she took a half
dozen eggs out of a basket and looking quickly around to be sure she was
unobserved, put them into her dress pocket. Harry Toddmore, the grocer's
son who had seen the theft, said nothing, but went unobserved out at the
back door. He got three or four clerks from other stores and they waited
for Jane Orange at a corner. When she came along they hurried out and Harry
Toddmore fell against her. Throwing out his hand he struck the pocket
containing the eggs a quick, sharp blow. Jane Orange turned and hurried
away toward home, but as she half ran through Main Street clerks and
merchants came out of the stores, and from the assembled crowd a voice
called attention to the fact that the contents of the stolen eggs having
run down the inside of her dress and over her stockings began to make a
stream on the sidewalk. A pack of town dogs excited by the shouts of the
crowd ran at her heels, barking and sniffing at the yellow stream that
dripped from her shoes.

An old man with a long white beard came to Bidwell to live. He had been a
carpet-bag Governor of a southern state in the reconstruction days after
the Civil War and had made money. He bought a house on Turner's Pike close
beside the river and spent his days puttering about in a small garden. In
the evening he came across the bridge into Main Street and went to loaf in
Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked with great frankness and candor of his
life in the South during the terrible time when the country was trying to
emerge from the black gloom of defeat, and brought to the Bidwell men a new
point of view on their old enemies, the "Rebs."

The old man--the name by which he had introduced himself in Bidwell was
that of Judge Horace Hanby--believed in the manliness and honesty of
purpose of the men he had for a time governed and who had fought a long
grim war with the North, with the New Englanders and sons of New Englanders
from the West and Northwest. "They're all right," he said with a grin. "I
cheated them and made some money, but I liked them. Once a crowd of them
came to my house and threatened to kill me and I told them that I did not
blame them very much, so they let me alone." The judge, an ex-politician
from the city of New York who had been involved in some affair that made it
uncomfortable for him to return to live in that city, grew prophetic and
philosophic after he came to live in Bidwell. In spite of the doubt every
one felt concerning his past, he was something of a scholar and a reader of
books, and won respect by his apparent wisdom. "Well, there's going to be a
new war here," he said. "It won't be like the Civil War, just shooting off
guns and killing peoples' bodies. At first it's going to be a war between
individuals to see to what class a man must belong; then it is going to be
a long, silent war between classes, between those who have and those who
can't get. It'll be the worst war of all."

The talk of Judge Hanby, carried along and elaborated almost every evening
before a silent, attentive group in the drug store, began to have an
influence on the minds of Bidwell young men. At his suggestion several
of the town boys, Cliff Bacon, Albert Small, Ed Prawl, and two or three
others, began to save money for the purpose of going east to college. Also
at his suggestion Tom Butterworth the rich farmer sent his daughter away to
school. The old man made many prophecies concerning what would happen in
America. "I tell you, the country isn't going to stay as it is," he said
earnestly. "In eastern towns the change has already come. Factories are
being built and every one is going to work in the factories. It takes an
old man like me to see how that changes their lives. Some of the men stand
at one bench and do one thing not only for hours but for days and years.
There are signs hung up saying they mustn't talk. Some of them make more
money than they did before the factories came, but I tell you it's like
being in prison. What would you say if I told you all America, all you
fellows who talk so big about freedom, are going to be put in a prison, eh?

"And there's something else. In New York there are already a dozen men who
are worth a million dollars. Yes, sir, I tell you it's true, a million
dollars. What do you think of that, eh?"

Judge Hanby grew excited and, inspired by the absorbed attention of his
audience, talked of the sweep of events. In England, he explained, the
cities were constantly growing larger, and already almost every one either
worked in a factory or owned stock in a factory. "In New England it is
getting the same way fast," he explained. "The same thing'll happen here.
Farming'll be done with tools. Almost everything now done by hand'll be
done by machinery. Some'll grow rich and some poor. The thing is to get
educated, yes, sir, that's the thing, to get ready for what's coming. It's
the only way. The younger generation has got to be sharper and shrewder."

The words of the old man, who had been in many places and had seen men and
cities, were repeated in the streets of Bidwell. The blacksmith and the
wheelwright repeated his words when they stopped to exchange news of their
affairs before the post-office. Ben Peeler, the carpenter, who had been
saving money to buy a house and a small farm to which he could retire when
he became too old to climb about on the framework of buildings, used the
money instead to send his son to Cleveland to a new technical school. Steve
Hunter, the son of Abraham Hunter the Bidwell jeweler, declared that he was
going to get up with the times, and when he went into a factory, would go
into the office, not into the shop. He went to Buffalo, New York, to attend
a business college.

The air of Bidwell began to stir with talk of new times. The evil things
said of the new life coming were soon forgotten. The youth and optimistic
spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the giant,
industrialism, and lead him laughing into the land. The cry, "get on in
the world," that ran all over America at that period and that still echoes
in the pages of American newspapers and magazines, rang in the streets of
Bidwell.

In the harness shop belonging to Joseph Wainsworth it one day struck a
new note. The harness maker was a tradesman of the old school and was
vastly independent. He had learned his trade after five years' service as
apprentice, and had spent an additional five years in going from place to
place as a journeyman workman, and felt that he knew his business. Also he
owned his shop and his home and had twelve hundred dollars in the bank. At
noon one day when he was alone in the shop, Tom Butterworth came in and
told him he had ordered four sets of farm work harness from a factory in
Philadelphia. "I came in to ask if you'll repair them if they get out of
order," he said.

Joe Wainsworth began to fumble with the tools on his bench. Then he turned
to look the farmer in the eye and to do what he later spoke of to his
cronies as "laying down the law." "When the cheap things begin to go to
pieces take them somewhere else to have them repaired," he said sharply. He
grew furiously angry. "Take the damn things to Philadelphia where you got
'em," he shouted at the back of the farmer who had turned to go out of the
shop.

Joe Wainsworth was upset and thought about the incident all the afternoon.
When farmer-customers came in and stood about to talk of their affairs
he had nothing to say. He was a talkative man and his apprentice, Will
Sellinger, son of the Bidwell house painter, was puzzled by his silence.

When the boy and the man were alone in the shop, it was Joe Wainsworth's
custom to talk of his days as a journeyman workman when he had gone from
place to place working at his trade. If a trace were being stitched or a
bridle fashioned, he told how the thing was done at a shop where he had
worked in the city of Boston and in another shop at Providence, Rhode
Island. Getting a piece of paper he made drawings illustrating the cuts of
leather that were made in the other places and the methods of stitching. He
claimed to have worked out his own method for doing things, and that his
method was better than anything he had seen in all his travels. To the
men who came into the shop to loaf during winter afternoons he presented
a smiling front and talked of their affairs, of the price of cabbage in
Cleveland or the effect of a cold snap on the winter wheat, but alone with
the boy, he talked only of harness making. "I don't say anything about it.
What's the good bragging? Just the same, I could learn something to all the
harness makers I've ever seen, and I've seen the best of them," he declared
emphatically.

During the afternoon, after he had heard of the four factory-made work
harnesses brought into what he had always thought of as a trade that
belonged to him by the rights of a first-class workman, Joe remained silent
for two or three hours. He thought of the words of old Judge Hanby and
the constant talk of the new times now coming. Turning suddenly to his
apprentice, who was puzzled by his long silence and who knew nothing of
the incident that had disturbed his employer, he broke forth into words.
He was defiant and expressed his defiance. "Well, then, let 'em go to
Philadelphia, let 'em go any damn place they please," he growled, and
then, as though his own words had re-established his self-respect, he
straightened his shoulders and glared at the puzzled and alarmed boy. "I
know my trade and do not have to bow down to any man," he declared. He
expressed the old tradesman's faith in his craft and the rights it gave the
craftsman. "Learn your trade. Don't listen to talk," he said earnestly.
"The man who knows his trade is a man. He can tell every one to go to the
devil."

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