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Clark's Field, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Chapter 1 |
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_ CHAPTER I The Clarks, as their name implies, were of common English blood, originally of some clerkly tribe and so possessing no distinctive patronymic. These Clarks were ordinary Yankee farmers, who had been settled in one place for upwards of two hundred years. Very likely some ancestor of my old Samuel Clark had stood at Concord with "the embattled farmers." I know not. He easily could have done so, for Alton was not many miles distant from the battle field. But little either spiritual or militant fervor from these Puritan ancestors seems to have come down to Samuel, who in 1860 occupied the family farm of one hundred and forty acres, "more or less," according to the loose description of old deeds. Samuel, indeed, had not enough patriotism to sympathize with his son, John Parsons, who finally ran off to the war, as so many boys did, to escape the monotony of farm life. For Samuel, his father, was a plain, ordinary, selfish, and not very thrifty New England farmer, who laid down his fields every year to the same crops of oats and rye and hay, kept a few sheep and hogs and cows, and in the easy, shiftless way of his kind drained the soil of his old farm, with the narrow consolation that it would somehow last his time. So little ambition he had that shortly after his son went to the war, thus depriving him of free labor, he "retired" from his farm,--that is, he sold what he could of its fields and pastures and bought himself a house on Church Street near the Square in Alton, probably the same house where I was taken for my one interview with him. What he did not sell of the farm he rented to another more energetic farmer, one Everitt Adams, the old market-gardener whom I remembered. Adams with more thrift and the great incentive of necessity built hothouses and went in for market-gardening to supply the wants of the neighboring city, which was already making itself felt upon the surrounding country. Hence the long rows of celery, cabbage, lettuce, and peas that I remember across my father's back fence. All the near-by farmers were doing much the same thing, turning the better part of their land into gardens. They would start before dawn in summer time for the city, making their way along the South Road, which was the main thoroughfare into this part of the country. Many a time have I seen their covered wagons returning from the city about the time when I was starting for school, the horses wearily plodding along at a walk, the farmer or his boy asleep in the wagon on his empty crates. I don't know what sort of an arrangement old Clark made with his tenant, but Adams, who was a hard-working fellow with a tribe of strong children, must have found the business profitable, especially after he built the forcing-houses and began to supply unseasonable luxuries to the prosperous citizens of B----. Prices ran high in the years of the great war, and those farmers who stayed at home and cultivated their gardens industriously made money at every turn. At any rate, it was common knowledge in the neighborhood of Fuller Place that Everitt Adams wished to purchase Clark's Field from its owner--the last piece of the old farm that he had not hitherto disposed of--and had the money to pay for it in the River Savings Bank. Indeed, gossip said that the price was agreed upon,--five thousand dollars,--which was considered a fair price in those days for fifty acres, six or seven miles from the city. And Samuel Clark, so tradition also says, was anxious to sell his last field for that price. His son had returned from the war wounded and incapable of work, and his father wanted to set him up in a small shop in the Square. The son, in spite of his invalidism, married shortly after his return from the ranks and this made the need of ready money in the Church Street house all the more urgent. Trouble came when the lawyer employed by the market-gardener discovered what old Clark must have known all the time, and that is that the Field had a cloud upon its title, or rather an absolute restriction which would render worthless any title that Samuel might give alone. To explain this legal obstacle we must go back before the war and my day into the previous generation. There had been a family quarrel between Samuel and his older brother, which had resulted finally in Edward Stanley--the elder son--going off to seek his fortunes in the new West, which was attracting young men from the East at that time. This was in 1840 or thereabouts when Edward S. left his father's home in Alton, and nothing more had been heard of him except the vague report from some other exile from Alton that he had been seen in Chicago where he had become a carpenter, and it was said had married. Probably Samuel, who was then a young man and recently married with two little children, had no great desire to have his elder brother's existence recalled to his father. Everything I have learned about Samuel confirms the impression of him I had as a boy, that he was not the kind of man whose conscience would be sensitive in such matters. He probably considered that his brother Ed, having taken his fate in his hands, should expect nothing from the more timid members of the family who had stuck by the old farm. But when the elder Clark died, a will was found in which to Samuel's disgust an undivided half interest in the Field--the best part of the farm--was left to his eldest son and his heirs. There is no evidence that Samuel, at the time of his father's death, ever took any measures, even of the most casual sort, to hunt up this elder brother or find out if he had left any children. He made some sort of deal with a younger brother who could not be ignored and continued to work the old farm, living in his father's house on Swan's Hill. Probably a long term of undisturbed possession of the farm convinced him that he was the sole legitimate owner of the property, that the land was absolutely and wholly his to do with what he would. And so, as we have seen, in his old age he tried to dispose of the Field to the market-gardener for five thousand dollars. But the lawyer raised the obvious objection that the Field could not be sold without Edward's consent, and of Edward nothing whatsoever was known. Some attempt was made at this time by John Clark on behalf of his father to trace the missing Edward--a feeble attempt. He wrote to an army friend in Chicago, who found evidence that Edward S. Clark, a carpenter, had lived in the city for five or six years and had moved thence to St. Louis. No trace of him could be found in St. Louis, where John also wrote to the postmaster. At that time, it should be remembered, St. Louis was the port of departure for the little-known West, and possibly Edward and his family had taken boat up the Missouri and gone on to the distant gold fields or had merely drifted out into the neighboring prairie country and stuck in some nook. It was all speculation. Nothing further of Edward Stanley Clark was ever known by either Samuel or his son John. He never announced himself to his Eastern relatives. But Samuel could not sell the Field. Old Adams was altogether too shrewd to spend five thousand dollars upon a property that had such an uncertainty about its title, and in those days the lawyers whose advice they were able to get could not suggest a satisfactory way of evading the difficulty. No such thing as a title guaranty company had ever been heard of in the old Commonwealth of M----. There was nothing to do but wait in the hope that either information about Edward S. would be forthcoming some day or that in time the law could be invoked to gloss over the title. But Samuel, in hope of inducing some gullible purchaser to run the risk, had the Field carefully fenced and put signs upon it. For he needed the money, and needed it more as the years went by and John's invalidism turned into chronic laziness and incapacity for earning a livelihood. Everitt Adams moved away after a time and his successors who leased the Field were never satisfactory. There were taxes and assessments to be met, which grew all the time with the rising value of adjacent land, as well as lawyer's fees. The income from the small part of the Field now under cultivation was hardly adequate to meet these, and after a time this income ceased altogether and the Field became an absolute burden. For nobody seemed willing either to rent or buy the property. Of course, the son John, if he had had the energy, might have followed old Adams's example and worked the Field for a time, until the gas and sewer mains had corrupted the soil and spoiled it for market gardening. But he preferred to rely upon his record as an old soldier and secured a small clerkship in the Alton Gas Company, and some years later obtained a pension. Of course, all this trouble with the Field supplied both him and his father with ample cause for grumbling. Samuel had never liked his brother Edward, who seemed almost spitefully to be turning this trick against him in his old age, and he handed on his grievance to John and his wife. The small, wooden house in Church Street contained a narrow, ungracious family life, it can be seen, of petty economies and few interests. No wonder that the Field--the one important family possession remaining--became the favorite topic of discussion and speculation. The city was growing fast, and Alton was already its most considerable suburb. The lines of modern life had crept up to within call of the old Field before the death of Samuel. So the old fellow was not indulging in much exaggeration when he bragged towards the end that he wouldn't take twenty-five thousand dollars for his property, although ten years earlier he had been eager to sell for five thousand dollars! That twenty-five thousand dollars, however, was as far away as the five thousand, and the life in the Church Street house was more penurious and uncomfortable than it had ever been on the old farm, which had provided a coarse plenty for many generations. The Clarks were obviously running out, and when the old man died in 1882 he must have had the bitter consciousness that the family destiny had dwindled in his hands. From being prosperous and respected farmers, living on their own land in their ancestral square wooden house with its one enormous chimney, they were living in real poverty in a small house on a dusty side street off the noisy Square, which was not what it had once been as a place of residence. And they did not even own this Church Street house--merely clung to it from inertia and bad habit. The only thing they did own was Clark's Field, and Mrs. John sometimes thought it would be better if that had gone the way of the rest of the Clark farm, so insidious was its moral influence upon the men as well as costly in the way of outgo.... If a man's accomplishment in this life is to be reckoned by the substantial gains he has made on his father's estate and condition, old Samuel Clark had nothing to be proud of when he was borne to his grave in the new cemetery a mile south of Clark's Field. He had left nothing to his children but the Field, encumbered with the undivided and indivisible half interest belonging to his brother Edward Stanley, were he alive at this date, and to his heirs if he had any. _ |
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