Vandemark's Folly Part 39

I did not read this paper. In fact, I did not read anything in those days; and I do not believe that Magnus and Rowena knew for some time anything more about this vile and slanderous item than I did. It was only by the way we were treated that we felt that the cold shoulder of the little world of Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p and Monterey County was turned toward us. Of course Magnus and Rowena expected this; but I was hurt more deeply by this injustice than by anything in my whole life.

Grandma Thornd.y.k.e came out no more to red up my house, and exhibit her samples of prospective wives to me. The neighbors called no more. I began driving over to the new railroad to do my marketing, though it was twice as close to go to Monterey Centre. When Elder Thornd.y.k.e, largely through the contributions of Governor Wade and Buckner Gowdy, succeeded in getting his church built, I was not asked to go to the doings of laying the corner-stone or s.h.i.+ngling the steeple. I was an outsider.

I quit trying to neighbor with the Roebucks, Smiths, and George Story, my new neighbors on the south; and took up with some French who moved in on the east, the families of Pierre Lacroix and Napoleon B. Bouchard. We called the one "Pete Lackwire" and the other "Poly Busher." They were the only French people who came into the towns.h.i.+p. They were good neighbors, and fair farmers, and their daughters made some of the best wives the sons of the rest of us got. One of my grandsons married the prettiest girl among their grandchildren--a Lacroix on one side and a Bouchard on the other.

It may well be understood that I now took no part in the towns.h.i.+p history, which gets more complex with the coming in of more settlers; but it was about this time that what is now Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p began agitating for a separate towns.h.i.+p organization. We were attached to Centre Towns.h.i.+p, in which was situated the town of Monterey Centre. This town, dominated by the County Ring, clung to all the territory it could control, so as to spend the taxes in building up the town. A great four-room schoolhouse was finished in the summer of 1860; most of it built by taxes paid by the speculators who still owned the bulk of the land.

The Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p people made a great outcry about the shape of Centre Towns.h.i.+p, and called it "The Great Crane," with our towns.h.i.+p as the neck, and a lot of other territory back of us for the body, and Monterey Centre for the head. I took no part in this agitation, for I was burning with a sense of indignation at the way people treated me; but the County Ring compromised by building us a schoolhouse on my southwest corner, now known as the Vandemark School. But I cared nothing about this. I had no children to go to school, and while I never ceased to dream of a future with Virginia as my wife, I kept saying to myself that I never should have a family. Consistency is the least of the necessaries of our visions and dreams. I never tried to see Virginia. I avoided the elder and Grandma Thornd.y.k.e. I knew that she was disgusted with me for even an innocent connection with the Thorkelson matter, and I supposed that Virginia felt the same way. So I went on trying to be as near to a hermit as I could.

2

I know now that things began to change for me in the minds of the people when Rowena's baby was christened. This took place early in the winter.

Magnus asked me to go to the church; so I was present when Magnus and Rowena stood before the altar in a ceremony which Rowena would have given anything to escape, and Magnus, too, but he believed that the child's soul could not be saved if it died unchristened, and she yielded to his urgings in the matter. He held his head high as he stood by her, as he always stood in every relation in life, witnessing before G.o.d and man that he believed her a victim, and that whatever guilt she may have incurred, she had paid for it in full. After the responses had been made, Elder Thornd.y.k.e unfolded a paper which had been handed him with the name of the child on it; then he went on with his part of the ceremony: "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I baptize thee--" And then he carried on a whispered conversation with the mother, gave the loudest honk I ever heard him utter, and went on: "I baptize thee, Owen Lovejoy Gowdy."

They said that Gowdy swore when he heard of this, and exclaimed, "I don't care about her picking me out; but I hate to be joined with that d.a.m.ned Black Abolitionist."

The elder seemed dazed after he had done the deed, and looked around at the new church building as if wondering whether he had not committed some sort of crime in thus offending a man who had put so much money in it. He had not, however; for in advertising in this way Gowdy's wrong to one girl, he ended forever his sly approaches, under the excuses of getting her some fict.i.tious property, saving his soul, and the like, to another.

I think it was the word of what Gowdy said about the christening that finally wrought Magnus up to the act he had all along resolved upon, the attempt on Gowdy's life. He armed himself and went over to the Blue-gra.s.s Manor looking for Buck; but found that his man had gone to Kentucky. Magnus left word for Gowdy to go armed and be prepared to protect himself, and went home. He said nothing to me about this; but the next spring when Gowdy came back, Magnus started after him again with a gun loaded with buckshot, and Gowdy, who, I suppose, looked upon Magnus as beneath him, had him arrested. I went to Monterey Centre and put my name on Magnus's bond when he was bound over to keep the peace.

I hinted to Magnus that he needn't mind about the bond if he still believed in his heart that Gowdy needed killing; but Rowena pleaded with him not to ruin himself, me and her by pursuing his plan of executing what both he and I believed to be justice on a man who had forfeited his life by every rule of right. This lapse into lawlessness on his part and mine can not be justified, of course. It is set forth here as a part of the history of the place and the time.

I am not equipped to write the history of the celebrated Gowdy Case, which grew out of these obscure circ.u.mstances in the lives of a group of pioneers in an Iowa towns.h.i.+p. Probably the writers of history will never set it down. Yet, it swayed the destiny of the county and the state in after years, when Gowdy had died and left his millions to be fought over in courts, in caucuses, in conventions, state and county. If it does not go into the histories, the histories will not tell the truth. If great law firms, governors, judges, congressmen and senators, lobbyists and manipulators, are not judged in the light of the secret as well as the surface influence of the Gowdy Case, they will not be rightly judged.

The same thing is true of the influence of the loss of the county funds by Judge Stone. Who was guilty? Was the plan to have the bag of "treasure" stolen from us by the Bunker gang a part of the scheme of whoever took the money? Did the Bushyagers know about the satchel? Did they know it was full of salt instead of money? Of course not, if they were in the thing.

Did some one mean to fix it so the Bunkers would rob us of the satchel and thus let everybody off? And if so, what about me? I should have had to fight for the money, for that was what I was hired for. Was I to be killed to save Judge Stone, or Governor Wade, and if so, which?

My part in the affair was never much spoken of in the hot newspaper and stump-speech quarrels over the matter; but after a while, when I had had time to figure it all out, I began to think I had not been treated quite right; but what was I anyhow? This was another thing that made me sore at all the Monterey Centre crowd, including the elder and grandma, with their truckling to Gowdy and Wade and Stone and the rest who helped the elder build his church. I suppose that the stolen money, some of it, went to pay for that church; but if every church had remained unbuilt that has stolen money in it, there would be fewer temples pointing, as the old song says, with taper spire to heaven, wouldn't there?

Of course these scandalous matters were soon lost sight of in the excitement of the Civil War. This thing which changed all our lives the way war does, came upon me like a clap of thunder. I was living like a hermit, and working like a horse, not trying to make any splurge, as I might have done, even having given up the idea of getting me a team of horses, which I had been thinking of for a while back with the notion of maybe getting a buggy and beginning to take Virginia out buggy-riding, and thus working up in a year or two to popping the question to her. But now I sulked in my cabin.

3

I guess the war surprised the people who read about it as much as it did me. I often thought of the poor slaves, and liked Dunlap and Thatcher, the men I had run into back in Wisconsin on the road in 1855, for going down into Kansas to fight for Free Soil; but as for fighting in which I should have any interest; bless you, it never occurred to any of us, either North or South. The trouble was always going to be off somewhere else. I guess that's the way with the oncoming of wars. If we knew they would come to us, we'd be less blood-thirsty.

I heard of the Dred Scott Decision, and thought J.P. Roebuck was talking foolishness when he came to me one day over in my back field to borrow a chew of tobacco--he was always doing that--and said that this decision made slavery a general thing all over the Union. I didn't see any slavery around Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p, and no signs of any. I heard of Old John Brown, and had a hazy idea that he was some kind of traitor who ought to have been hanged, or the government wouldn't have hanged him.

You see how inconsistent I was. But wars are fought by inconsistent men who suffer and die for other people's ideas: don't you think so? Abraham Lincoln was nominated about corn-planting time; but I was not thrilled.

I had never heard of him. The nation was drifting down the rapids to the falls; and for all the deafening roar that came to our ears, we did not know or think of the cataract we were to be swept over.

I was a voter now, and so was Magnus; but he was for Lincoln, and I was not. It seemed to me that the Republican Party was too new. And yet I was not satisfied with Douglas. Why? It was merely because I had got it into my mind that he had been beaten in a debate by Lincoln, and it seemed that this defeat ought to put him out of the running for president. I sat down a few rods from the polls and thought over the matter of choosing between Edward Everett and John C. Breckenridge, pestered by Governor Wade and H.L. Burns and N.V. and the rest, until finally they left me and when I had made my decision, I found that the polls had closed. I was a good deal relieved.

I am giving you a glimpse into the mind of a conscientious and ignorant voter. If I had read more, my mind would have been made up beforehand, but by some one else. I was not a fool; I was just slow and bewildered.

The average voter shoots at the flock and gets it over with. He has had his mind made up for him by some one--and maybe it's just as well: for when he tries, as I did, to make it up for himself, he is apt to find that he has no basis for judgment. That is why all governments, free and the other kind, have always been minority governments, and always will be. And I reckon that's just as well, too.

Lincoln's first call for volunteers took only a few men out of the county, and none from Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p, except George Story. I had not begun to take much interest in the matter; and when in the summer of 1861 there began to be war meetings to spur up young men to enlistment the speakers all shouted to us that the war was not to free the slaves, but to save the Union. Now this was a new slant on the question, and I had to think over it for a while.

Sitting in the wagon of history with my feet dangling down and facing the rear, as we all ride, I can now see that the thing was as broad as it was long. The Union could not be preserved without freeing the slaves, for all of what Lincoln said when he stated that he would save the Union by freeing the slaves if he could do that, or by keeping them slaves if he could do that, or by freeing some of them and leaving the rest in servitude if he could do that; but that save the Union he would.

Now in my narrow way, I could see some point in freeing the slaves, but as for the Union, I hardly knew whether it was important or not. I needed to think it over. It might be just as well not to fight to preserve the Union; and when I had heard men say, "I enlisted to save the Union, and not to free n.i.g.g.e.rs," as a lot of them did, I scratched my head and wondered why I could not feel so devoted to the Union as they did. Looking back from the tail-end of the wagon, I now see what Lincoln meant by the importance of keeping us all under one flag; but I didn't know then, and I don't believe one man in a hundred who shouted for the Union knew why the Union was so important. There never was a better cause than the one we sung for in "The Union, the Union forever!"

but thousands and thousands sang and shouted it, and died for it--how bravely and wonderfully they died for it!--who knew as little what it meant as I did. And the rebels--how gallantly they died for their cause, too. Not for slavery, as we blindly thought, misjudging them as we must always misjudge our foes (or we should not have the hate in our hearts to fight them); but for the very thing we were fighting for--liberty, as they believed.

Both sides are always right in war.

I finally began to see light when I thought one night of my old life on the ca.n.a.l, and asked myself how it would affect us in Iowa if York State and the East should secede, as the South was trying to do. It would put them in shape to starve us of the West by levying duties on our crops when going to market. But, said I to myself, we could then s.h.i.+p down the Mississippi; but the river was already closed and would always be controlled by the Confederacy. This was serious; but when I said to myself that the East would never secede, the question, Why not?

could not be answered if the principle of secession could once be set up as correct and made good by victory. Then, it came into my mind after a month or two of thinking, that any state or group of states could secede whenever they liked; that others would go to war with them to keep such unions as were left; and we should never be at peace long: so after all, the Union _was_ important, and must be preserved.

The question must be settled now in this war.

But I don't know how long I should have studied this matter over in my lonely benightedness, if I had not seen Virginia one night at a war meeting that I sneaked into in the Centre, with a young man dressed in store clothes whom I afterward knew as Will Lockwood, the princ.i.p.al of the Monterey Centre school, who seemingly was going forward to put his name down as enlisted. I jumped in ahead of him, so as to show Virginia that her fellow was not the only patriot, and beat him to it.

"So you are going to fight Kaintucky?" said she to me as if I had engaged to ruin everything she held dear.

"We must save the Union," I said. "I didn't think of you being on the other side!"

"Mr. Lockwood," said she, "this is Teunis Vandemark, an old friend of mine. He's going to fight my friends, too."

In two or three minutes I found that he was from Herkimer County, had lived along the Erie Ca.n.a.l, and was actually the son of my old teacher Lockwood, to whom I had gone when I was wintering with Mrs. Fogg in the old ca.n.a.lling days. He was my best friend during all my service as a soldier--which you will soon see was not long. We left him on the field at s.h.i.+loh.

4

The recruiting officer got us uniforms--or somebody did; and during the nice weather--it was October when I enlisted--our company did some drilling. We had no arms, but used shotguns, squirrel rifles, and even sticks. Will Lockwood tried to drill us, but made a bad mess of it. Then one day Buckner Gowdy, who had also enlisted, took charge of a squad of men and in ten minutes showed that he knew more about drill than any one else in the county. He had been educated at a military school in Virginia.

All the skill in drill that we ever got, we owed to him. The sharp word of command; the quick swing to the proper position; the snappy step; everything that we knew more than a lot of yokels might be expected to know, we got from Buck Gowdy. Magnus admitted it, even; but he turned pale whenever he was in a squad under Gowdy's command. It was gall and wormwood for me, and worse for him; but when it came to electing a captain of our company, I voted for Gowdy, and under the same conditions would do it again. It was better to have a real captain who was a scoundrel, than a man who knew nothing but kept the Commandments. War is h.e.l.l in more than one respect. I felt that Gowdy would be more likely to bring us safe out of any bad hole in which we might find ourselves, than any one else. But I was glad, sometimes, when he was rawhiding us into shape, that Magnus Thorkelson was drilling with a wooden gun. I wondered how the new captain himself felt about this.

Governor Wade gave us a great entertainment at his farm just before we marched--still without guns--to the railroad to take the cars for Dubuque, where boats were supposed to be waiting to take us down the river--if we could make it before navigation was closed by the ice. His great barns were cleared out for tables, and the house was open, and there were flags and transparencies expressing the heroism of those who were willing to do anything to get us into the fight.

Everybody was there--except Judge Stone. I remember looking through the open door at the great iron safe into which he had put the county satchel--I am careful not to commit myself as to the money part of it--and all the events of the previous visit came back through my mind; but mainly how angry I had been with Virginia for being kissed by Bob Wade. And Bob was there, too, all spick and span in his new lieutenant's uniform with Kittie Fleming hanging on his arm, her eyes drinking him in with every glance. The governor was in no position to make a row about this. The occasion had caused an armistice to be signed as to all our neighborhood quarrels, and Bob Wade was emanc.i.p.ated from the stern paternal control, as Jack had been when he went off with the first flight in the original seventy-five thousand--emanc.i.p.ated by the uniform. Bob and Kittie sailed along in the face and eyes of the governor and his wife in spite of the fact that such a.s.sociation was forbidden--and sailed down to Waterloo where they were married before we went off hurrahing for the cause.

Virginia was there with the elder and grandma. The old preacher and his wife looked more shabby than I had ever seen them, grandma's gloves more extensively darned, the elder's clothes s.h.i.+nier, his cuffs in all their whiteness more frayed, and there were beautifully darned places in the stiff starched bosom of his s.h.i.+rt. He pressed my hand warmly as he said, "G.o.d bless you, Jacob, and bring you safe back to us, my boy!" Grandma's eyes glistened as she echoed his sentiments and began asking me about my underwear and especially my socks. Virginia looked the other way; but when I went off by myself, Will Lockwood came and drew me away into a corner to talk with me about old times along the ca.n.a.l; and suddenly we found Virginia there, and Will all at once thought of some one he wanted to speak to and left us together.

"I didn't mean that I thought you ought not to go to the war, Teunis,"

said she. "You must go, of course."

"Maybe your friends," I said after standing dumb for a while, "will be on the Union side."

"No," said she. "I have no relations--and few friends there; but all I have will be on the other side, I reckon. It makes no difference.

They've forgotten me by this time. Everybody has forgotten me that once liked me--everybody but Elder Thornd.y.k.e and Mrs. Thornd.y.k.e. They love me, but n.o.body else does."

"I thought some others acted as if they did," I said.

"You thought a lot about it!" she scoffed. Then we sat quite a while silent. "I shall think every day," said she at last, "about the only happy time I have had since Ann took sick--and long before that. The only happy time, and the happiest, I reckon, that I ever'll have. I'll think of it every day while you're at the front. I want you to know when you are suffering and in danger that some one thinks of the kindest thing you ever did--and maybe the kindest thing any boy ever did. You don't care about it now, maybe; but the time may come when you will."

"What time was that?" I asked.

"You know, Teunis," the tears were falling in her lap now. "Those days when we were together alone on the wide prairie--when you took me in and was so good to me--and saved me from going wild, if not from anything else bad. I remember that for the first few days, I was not quite easy in my feelings--I reckon your goodness hadn't come to me yet; but one day, after you had been away for a while, there in the grove where we stayed so long, you looked so pale and sorry that I began talking to you more intimately, you remember, and we suddenly drew close to each other, and for the first time, I felt so safe, so safe! Something has come between us lately, Teunis. I partly know what; and partly I don't; but something--"

She stopped in the middle of what she seemed to be saying. At first I thought she had choked up with grief, but when I looked her in the face, except for her eyes s.h.i.+ning very bright, I could not see that she was at all worked up in her feelings. She spoke quite calmly to some one that pa.s.sed by. I was abashed by the thought that she was giving me credit for something I was not ent.i.tled to. She spoke of the day when I was in my heart the meanest: but how could I explain? So I said nothing, much, but hummed and hawed, with "I--" and "Yes, I--," and nothing to the point. Finally, I bogged down, and quit.

"We are very poor," said she, nodding toward the elder and grandma. "So, ignorant as I am, I kept a school last summer--did you know that?"