The Shrinking Of Kingman's Field

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Title:     The Shrinking Of Kingman's Field
Author: Walter Prichard Eaton [More Titles by Eaton]

"It was rats," said I.

"It was warts," said Old Hundred.

"I know it was rats, I tell you," I continued, "because my uncle Eben knew a man who did it. His house was full of rats, so he wrote a very polite note to them, setting forth that, much as he enjoyed their excellent society, the house was too crowded for comfort, and telling them to go over to the house of a certain neighbor, who had more room and no children nor cats. And the rats all went."

Old Hundred listened patiently. "That's precisely right," said he, "except it must have been warts. You have to be polite, and also tell them where to go. You rub the warts with a bean, wrap the bean up in the note, and burn both, or else throw them in the well. In a few days the warts will leave you and appear on the other fellow. My grandfather, when he was a boy, got warts that way, so he licked the other boy."

"Rats!" said I.

"No, warts," persisted Old Hundred.

So that was how we two aging and urbanized codgers came to leave the comfortable club for the Grand Central Station, whence we sent telegrams to our families and took train for the rural regions north-eastward. The point had to be settled. Besides, I stumped Old Hundred to go, and he never could refuse a stump.

But Old Hundred was fretful on the journey. We called him Old Hundred years ago, because he always proposed that tune at Sunday evening meetings, when the leader "called for hymns." I address him as Old Hundred still, though he is a learned lawyer in line for a judgeship. He was fretful, he said, because we were sure to be terribly disillusioned. But he is not a man accustomed in these later years to act on impulse, and the prospect of a night on a sleeping car, without pajamas, did not, I fancy, appeal to him, now that he faced it from the badly ventilated car aisle, instead of the club easy-chair. Yet perhaps he did dread the disillusionment, too. It was always I, even when we were boys, who loved an adventure for its own sake, quite apart from the pleasure or pain of it--taking a supreme delight, in fact, in melancholy. I have still a copy of Moore's poems, stained with tears and gingerbread. Some of the happiest hours of my childhood were spent in weeping over this book, especially over "Go Where Glory Waits Thee," which affected me with an incomprehensible but poignant woe. Accordingly it was I who rose cheerful in the morning and piloted a gloomy companion to breakfast and a barber, and so across Boston to the dingy station where dingy, dirty cars of ancient vintage awaited, and in one of which we rode, with innumerable stops, to a spot off the beaten tracks of travel, but which bore a name that thrilled us.

When we alighted from the train, a large factory greeted our vision, across the road from the railway station. We walked up a faintly familiar street to the village square. There we paused, with wry faces. Six trolley lines converged in its centre, and out of the surrounding country were rolling in great cars, as big almost as Pullmans. All the magnificent horse-chestnut trees that once lined the walks were down, to expose more brazenly to view the rows of tawdry little shops. These trees had once furnished shade and ammunition. I had to smile at the sign above the new fish-market--

IF IT SWIMS--WE HAVE IT.

But there was no smile on Old Hundred's face. Here and there, rising behind the little stores and lunch rooms, we could detect the tops of the old houses, pushed back by commerce. But most of the houses had disappeared altogether. Only the old white meeting-house at the head of the common looked down benignly, unchanged.

"The trail of the trolley is over it all!" Old Hundred murmured, as we hastened northward, out of the village.

After we had walked some distance, Old Hundred said, "It ought to be around here somewhere, to the right of the road. I can't make anything out, for these new houses."

"There was a lane down to it," said I, "and woods beyond."

"Sure," he cried, "Kingman's woods; and it was called Kingman's field."

I sighted the ruins of a lane, between two houses. "Come on down to Kingman's, fellers," I shouted, "an' choose up sides!"

Old Hundred followed my lead. We were in the middle of a potato patch, in somebody's back yard. It was very small.

"This ain't Kingman's," wailed Old Hundred, lapsing into bad grammar in his grief. "Why, it took an awful paste to land a home run over right field into the woods! And there ain't no woods!"

There weren't. Nevertheless, this was Kingman's field. "See," said I, trying to be cheerful, "here's where home was." And I rooted up a potato sprout viciously. "You and Bill Nichols always chose up. You each put a hand round a bat, alternating up the stick, for the first choice. The one who could get his hand over the top enough to swing the bat round his head three times, won, and chose Goodknocker Pratt. First was over there where the wall isn't any more."

"Remember the time we couldn't find my 'Junior League'," said Old Hundred, "and Goodknocker dreamed it was in a tree, and the next day we looked in the trees, and there it was? I wonder what ever became of old Goodknocker?"

He moved toward first base. The woods had been ruthlessly cut down, and the wall dragged away in the process. We climbed a knoll, through the stumps and dead stuff. At the top was a snake bush.

"Here's something, anyhow," said Old Hundred. "You were Uncas and I was Hawk Eye, and we defended this snake bush from Bill's crowd of Iroquois. We made shields out of barrel heads, and spears out of young pine-tree tops. Wow, how they hurt!"

"About half a mile over is the swamp where the traps were," said I. "Let's go. Maybe there's something in one of 'em."

"Then times would be changed," said he, smiling a little.

We walked a few hundred feet, and there was the swamp, quite dried up without the protection of the woods, a tangle of dead stuff, and in plain view of half a dozen houses. "Why" cried Old Hundred, "it was miles away from _anything_!"

I looked at him, a woeful figure, clad in immaculate clothes, with gray gloves, a cane in his hand. "You ought to be wearing red mittens," said I, "and carrying that old shot-gun, with the ramrod bent."

"The ramrod was always bent," said he. "It kept getting caught in twigs, or falling out. Gee, how she kicked! Remember the day I got the rabbit down there on the edge of the swamp? It made the snow all red, poor little thing. I guess I wasn't so pleased as I expected to be."

"I remember the day you didn't get the wood pussy--soon enough," I answered.

Just then a whistle shrieked. "Good Lord," said Old Hundred, "there's one of those infernal trolleys! It must go right up the turnpike, past Sandy."

"Let's take it!" I cried.

He looked at me savagely. "We'll walk!" he said.

"But it's miles and miles," I remonstrated.

"Nevertheless," said he, "we'll walk."

It was difficult to find the short cut in this tangle of slaughtered forest, but we got back to the road finally, coming out by the school-house. At least, we came out by a little shallow hole in the ground, half filled with poison-ivy and fire-weed, and ringed by a few stones. We paused sadly by the ruins.

"I suppose the trolly takes the kids into the village now," said I. "Centralization, you know."

"There used to be a great stove in one corner, and the pipe went all across the room," Old Hundred was saying, as if to himself. "If you sat near it, you baked; if you didn't, you froze. Do you remember Miss Campbell? What was it we used to sing about her? Oh, yes--

Three little mice ran up the stairs
To hear Biddy Campbell say her prayers;
And when they heard her say Amen,
The three little mice ran down again.

And, gee but you were the punk speller! Remember how there was always a spelling match Friday afternoons? I'll never forget the day you fell down on 'nausea.' You'd lasted pretty well that day, for you; everybody'd gone down but you and Myrtie Swett and me and one or two more. But when Biddy Campbell put that word up to you, you looked it, if you couldn't spell it!"

"Hum," said I, "I wouldn't rub it in, if I were you. I seem to recall a public day when old Gilman Temple, the committee man, asked you what was the largest bird that flies, and you said, 'The Kangaroo.'"

Old Hundred grinned. "That's the day the new boy laughed," said he. "Remember the new boy? I mean the one that wore the derby which we used to push down over his eyes? Sometimes in the yard one of us would squat behind him, and then somebody else would push him over backward. We made him walk Spanish, too. But after that public day he and I went way down to the horse-sheds behind the meeting-house in the village, and had it out. I wonder why we always fought in the holy horse-sheds? The ones behind the town hall were never used for that purpose."

This was true, but I couldn't explain it. "We couldn't always wait to get to the horse-sheds, as I remember it," said I. "Sometimes we couldn't wait to get out of sight of school."

I began hunting the neighborhood for the hide-and-seek spots. The barn and the carriage-shed across the road were still there, with cracks yawning between the mouse-gray boards. The shed was also ideal for "Anthony over." And in the pasture behind the school stood the great boulder, by the sassafras tree. "I'll bet you can't count out," said I.

"Pooh!" said Old Hundred. He raised his finger, pointed it at an imaginary line of boys and girls, and chanted--

"Acker, backer, soda cracker,
Acker, backer, boo!
If yer father chews terbacker,
Out goes you.

And now you're it," he finished pointing at me.

I was not to be outdone. "Ten, twenty, thirty, forty,--" I began to mumble. Then, "One thousand!" I shouted.

"Bushel o' wheat and a bushel o' rye,
All 't 'aint hid, holler knee high!"

I looked for a stick, stood it on end, and let it fall. It fell toward the boulder. "You're up in the sassafras tree," I said.

"No," said Old Hundred, "that's Benny."

Then we looked at each other and laughed.

"You poor old idiot," said Old Hundred.

"You doddering imbecile," said I, "come on up to Sandy."

Somehow, it wasn't far to Sandy. It used to be miles. We passed by Myrtie Swett's house on the way. It stood back from the turnpike just as ever, with its ample doorway, its great shadowing elms, its air of haughty well-being. Myrtie, besides a prize speller, was something of a social queen. She was very beautiful and she affected ennui.

"Oh, dear, bread and beer,
If I was home I shouldn't be here!"

she used to say at parties, with a tired air that was the secret envy of the other little girls, who were unable to conceal their pleasure at being "here." However, Myrtie never went home, we noticed. Rather did she take a leading part in every game of Drop-the-handkerchief, Post Office, or Copenhagen--tinglingly thrilling games, with unknown possibilities of a sentimental nature.

"If I thought she still lived in the old place, I'd go up and tell her I had a letter for her," said Old Hundred.

"She'd probably give you a stamp," I replied.

"Not unless she's changed!" he grinned.

But we saw no signs of Myrtie. Several children played in the yard. There was the face of a strange woman at the window, a very plain woman, who looked old, as she peered keenly at the two urban passers.

"It _can't_ be Myrtie!" I heard Old Hundred mutter, as he hastened on.

Sandy was almost the most wonderful spot in the world. It was, as most swimming holes are, on the down-stream side of a bridge. The little river widened out, on its way through the meadows, here and there into swimming holes of greater or less desirability. There was Lob's Pond, by the mill, and Deep Pool, and Musk Rat, and Little Sandy. But Sandy was the best of them all. It was shaded on one side by great trees, and the banks were hidden from the road by alder screens. At one end there was a shelving bottom, of clean sand, where the "little kids" who couldn't swim sported in safety. Under the opposite bank the water ran deep for diving. And in mid-stream the pool was so very deep that nobody had ever been able to find bottom there. In the other holes, you could hold your hands over your head and go down till your feet touched, without wetting your fingers. But not the longest fish-line had ever been long enough to plumb Sandy's depths. Indeed, it was popularly believed that there was _no_ bottom in Sandy, and a mythical horn pout, of gigantic proportions, was supposed to inhabit its dark, watery abysses.

Old Hundred and I stood on the bridge and looked down on a little pool. "I could jump across it now," he sighed. "But I wish it were a warmer day. I'd go in, just the same."

There was a honk up the road, and a touring car jolted over the boards behind us, with a load of veils and goggles. The dust sifted through the bridge, and we heard it patter on the water below.

"I fancy there's more travel now," said I. "And the alder screen seems to be gone. Perhaps we'd better not go in."

Old Hundred leaned pensively over the white rail--the sign of a State highway; for the dusty old Turnpike was now converted into a gray strip of macadam road, torn by the automobiles, with a trolley track at one side.

"There's a lucky bug on the water," he said presently. "If we were in now, we might catch him, and make our fortunes."

"And get our clothes tied up," said I.

"As I recall it, you were the prize beef chawer," he remarked. "I never could see why you didn't go into vaudeville, in a Houdini act. I used to soak the knots in your shirt and dry 'em, and soak 'em again; but you always untied 'em, often without using your teeth, either."

"You couldn't, though," I grinned.

"Charlo beef,
The beef was tough,
Poor Old Hundred
Couldn't get enough!

"How many times have you gone home barefoot, with your stockings and your undershirt, in a wet knot, tied to your fish-pole?"

"Not many," said he.

"What?" said I.

"It wasn't often that I wore stockings and an undershirt in swimming season," he answered. "Don't you remember being made to soak your feet in a tub on the back porch before going to bed, and going fast asleep in the process?"

"If you put a horse hair in water, it will turn to a snake," I replied, irrelevantly.

"Anybody knows that," said Old Hundred. "If you toss a fish back in the water before you're done fishing, you won't get any more bites, because he'll go tell all the other fish. Bet yer I can swim farther under the water 'n you can. Come on, it isn't very cold."

I looked hesitantly at the pool.

"Stump yer!" he taunted.

I started for the bank. But just then the trolley wire, which we had quite forgotten, began to buzz. We paused. Up the pike came the car. It stopped just short of the bridge, by a cross-road, and an old man alighted. Then it moved on, shaking more dust down upon the brown water. The old man regarded us a moment, and instead of turning up the cross-road, came over to us.

("Know him?" I whispered.)

("Is it Hen Flint, that used to drive the meat wagon with the white top?" said Old Hundred. "Lord, is it so many years ago!")

"How are you, Mr. Flint?" said I.

"Thot I didn't mistake ye," said the old man, putting out a large, thin, but powerful hand. "Whar be ye now, Noo York? Come back to look over the old place, eh? I reckon ye find it some changed. Don't know it myself, hardly. You look like yer ma; sorter got her peak face."

"Where's the swimming hole now?" asked Old Hundred.

"I don't calc'late thar be any," said the old man. "The gol durn trolley an' the automobiles spiled the pool here, an' the mill-pond's no good since they tore down the mill, an' bust the dam. Maybe the little fellers git their toes wet down back o' Bill Flint's; I see 'em splashin' round thar hot days. But the old fellers have to wash in the kitchen, same's in winter."

"But the boys must swim somewhere," said I.

"I presume likely they go to the beaches," said Henry Flint. "I see 'em ridin' off in the trolley."

"Yes," said I, "it must be easy to get anywhere now, with the trolleys so thick."

"It's too durn easy," he commented. "Thar hain't a place ye can't git to, though why ye should want to git thar beats me. Mostly puts high-flown notions in the women-folks' heads, and vegetable gardens on 'em."

He shook hands again, lingeringly. "Yer father wus a fine man," he said to Old Hundred--"a fine man. I sold yer ma meat before you wus born."

Then he moved rather feebly away, down the cross-road. Presently a return trolley approached.

"Curse the trolleys!" exclaimed Old Hundred. "They go everywhere and carry everybody. They spoil the country roads and ruin the country houses and villages. Where they go, cheap loafing places, called waiting-rooms, spring up, haunted by flies, rotten bananas and village muckers. They trail peanut shells, dust and vulgarity; and they make all the country-side a back yard of the city. Let's take this one."

We passed once more the hole where the school had been, and drew near a cross-road. I looked at Old Hundred, he at me. He nodded, and we signalled the conductor. The car stopped. We alighted and turned silently west, pursued by peering eyes. After a few hundred feet the cross-road went up a rise and round a bend, and the new frame houses along the Turnpike were shut from view. Over the brambled wall we saw cows lying down in a pasture.

"It's going to rain," said I.

"No," said Old Hundred, "that's only a sign when they lie down first thing in the morning."

Then we were silent once more. Into the west the land, the rocky, rolling, stubborn, beautiful New England country-side, lay familiar--how familiar!--to our eyes. To the left, back among the oaks and hickories, stood a solid, simple house, painted yellow with green blinds. To the right almost opposite was a smaller house of white, with an orchard straggling up to the back door. And in one of them I was born, and in the other Old Hundred. Down the road was another house, a deep red, half hidden in the trees. Smoke was rising from the chimney now, and drifting rosily against the first flush of sunset.

"Betsy's getting Cap'n Charles's supper," said Old Hundred.

"Then Betsy's about one hundred and six," said I, "and the Cap'n one hundred and ten. Oh, John, it was a long, long time ago!"

"It doesn't seem so," he answered. "It seems only yesterday that we met up there in your grove on Hallow-e'en to light our jack-lanterns, and crept down the road in the cold white moonlight to poke them up at Betsy's window. Remember when she caught us with the pail of water?"

"I remember," said I, "the time you put a tack in the seat of Cap'n Charles's stool, in his little shoemaker's shop out behind the house, and he gave you five cents, to return good for evil; so the next day you did it again, in the hope of a quarter, but he decided there were times when the Golden Rule is best honored in the breach, and gave you a walloping."

"It was some walloping, too," said Old Hundred, with a reminiscent grin. "It would be a good time now," he added, "to swipe melons, if Betsy's getting supper. Though I believe she had all those melon stems connected with an automatic burglar-alarm in the kitchen. She ought to have taken out a patent on that invention!"

He looked about him, first at his house, then at mine. "How small the orchard is now," he mused. "The trees are like little old women. And look at Crow's Nest--it used to be a hundred feet high."

The oak he pointed at still bore in its upper branches the remains of our tree-top retreat, a rotted beam or two straddling a crotch. "Peter Pan should rebuild it," said I. "I shall drop a line to Wendy. Do you still hesitate to turn over in bed?"

"Always," Old Hundred confessed. "I do turn over now, but it was years before I could bring myself to do it. I wonder where we got that superstition that it brought bad luck? If we woke in the night, up in Crow's Nest, and wanted to shift our positions, we got up and walked around the foot of the mattress, so we could lie on the other side without turning over. Remember?"

I nodded. Then the well-curb caught my eye. It was over the well we dug where old Solon Perkins told us to. Solon charged three dollars for the advice. He came with a forked elm twig, cut green, and holding the prongs tightly wrapped round his hands so that the base of the twig stuck out straight, walked back and fourth over the place, followed by my father and mother, and Old Hundred's father and mother, and Cap'n Charles and Betsy, and all the boys for a mile around, silently watching for the miracle. Finally the base of the twig bent sharply down. "Dig there," said Solon. He examined the twig to see if the bark was twisted. It was, so he added, "Bent hard. Won't have ter dig more'n ten foot." We dug twenty-six, but water came. And such water!

"I want some of that water," said I. "I don't want to go into the house; I don't even know who lives in it now. But I must have some of that water."

We went up to the well and lowered the bucket, which slid bounding down against the cool stones till it hit the depths with a dull splash. As we were drinking, an old man came peering out of the house. Old Hundred recognized him first.

"Well, Clarkie Poor, by all that's holy!" he cried. "We've come to get our hair cut."

Clarkson Poor blinked a bit before recognition came. "Yes," he said, "I bought the old place a couple o' year back, arter them city folks you sold it to got sick on it. Too fer off the trolley line for them. John's house over yon some noo comers 'a' got. They ain't changed it none. This is about the only part o' town that ain't changed, though. Most o' the old folks is gone, too, and the young uns, like you chaps, all git ambitious fer the cities. I give up cuttin' hair 'bout three year back--got kinder onsteady an' cut too many ears."

A sudden smile broke over Old Hundred's face. "Clarkie," he said, "you were always up on such things--is it rats or warts that you write a note to when you want 'em to go away?"

"Yes, it's rats, isn't it?" I cried, also reminded, for the first time, of our real quest.

"Why," said Clarkie, "you must be sure to make the note very partic'lar perlite, and tell 'em whar to go. Don't fergit that."

"Yes, yes," said we, "but is it warts or rats?"

"Well," said Clarkie, "it's both."

We looked one at the other, and grinned rather sheepishly.

"Only thar's a better way fer warts," Clarkie went on. "I knew a boy once who sold his. That's the best way. Yer don't have actually to sell 'em. Just git another feller to say, 'I'll give yer five cents fer yer warts,' and you say, 'All right, they're yourn,' and then they go. Fact."

We thanked him, and moved down to the road, declining his invitation to come into the house. Westward, the sun had gone down and left the sky a glowing amber and rose. The fields rolled their young green like a checkered carpet over the low hills--the sweet, familiar hills. For an instant, in the hush of gathering twilight, we stood there silent and bridged the years; wiping out the strife, the toil, the ambitions, we were boys again.

"Hark!" said Old Hundred, softly. Down through the orchard we heard the thin, sweet tinkle of a cow-bell. "There's a boy behind, with the peeled switch," he added, "looking dreamily up at the first star, and wishing on it--wishing for a lot of things he'll never get. But I'm sure he isn't barefoot. Let's go."

As we passed down the turnpike, between the rows of cheap frame houses, we saw, in the increasing dusk, the ruins of a lane, and the corner of a small, back-yard potato patch, that had been Kingman's field. We hastened through the noisy, treeless village, and boarded the Boston train, rather cross for want of supper.

"I wonder," said Old Hundred, as we moved out of the station, "whether we'd better go to Young's or the Parker House?"

[The end]
Walter Prichard Eaton's essay: The Shrinking Of Kingman's Field

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