The American: A Middle Western Legend Read Online Free PDF Page A

to please. She smiled and kissed him; she even cried a little. This son was not to be beaten with a harness strap; he had seen the world and the enemy, and he had made his compact with the mysterious warlords. As peasants, with the peasant tradition of father and grandfather and twenty generations before that, they accepted the separation; actually, they had not expected the son to come back, but he was back now and he was a stranger to them and so was to be suspected and feared, even though tears had flowed. Tears must flow; he was blood of their blood and flesh of their flesh.
    To his brothers and sisters, he was also a hero, a man who had been to the great and bloody war and seen the terrible face of Johnny Reb. They were prepared to admire him, to grant him leadership, to listen to his tales of glory, and even to like him—but he threw them off. They remembered that he was sullen once, and he was not too different now. He told no tales. When pressed:
    â€œDid you fight?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œKill anyone?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œSeen Jeff Davis?”
    â€œNo.”
    Just that way, and he lost them; having almost had them, he found himself cut off, and after a week or two of farm work, work never so hard as he had done once, he knew that he must go away, and told his father that.
    â€œWhere do you go?” the father asked him.
    He had worked out a plan. He knew something now; if they thought he was a piece of driftwood only a war could claim, he would show them different. He could read and write English, and he could do sums, simple sums, it is true, but a beginning. He was going to be educated, and some day he would come back here, not as a soldier from the wars, but as a lord and master. He told his father that he was going to the school at Mansfield.
    â€œSchool,” the father said, not as he would have said it once, but trying to grasp the word, feel it, relate it. “School is for the rich, for the Duke’s son or the son of the merchant—” In his own tongue, he fell into references from the old country, and his German took on a whining, bitter accent. “School is not for a worker, not for a farmer, not for us. Were you born with silk stockings, or did you get these damned notions from your companions at war? Are you a worthless loafer now that the army has sent you back to take the bread from the ground once more, the way our kind should?”
    â€œMaybe I am, I don’t know,” Pete said.
    â€œThen go back to work.”
    He knew there was no use talking about it, no use arguing it. Pick up and go off, yet he was old enough to know that the world isn’t a mother to men. He had strength to sell for food and drink, yet he had never sold it as a free agent, without even a burrow to crawl back to. When he left the farm this time, there would be no returning. His mother begged him, “We are old folks, your father means no harm. So stay here.” When they pressed him, he felt an anger that was unlike anything else; he burst out. He left without even saying goodby.

XII
    Though the school was free, it took away his working time. Hours he could have sold at wages had to be put into study, and still he had to have a place to sleep and something to eat. With two other boys, he found a miserable little room over the Mansfield tannery. It stank like a chemical vat; it was hot in the summer, cold in the winter. There were no beds; they slept on the floor, sharing a few old horse blankets.
    They ate what they could get when they could get it, scraps from the butcher, cooked meal, stale bread. If Pete earned three dollars a week, he could live, but three dollars was a goal, not a regular achievement. School was work too; he didn’t learn quickly; it took him ten hours a day to keep up with the normal progress of a boy three years younger than he. He was big and ungainly and a dolt, a man back from war sitting in a schoolhouse, and not bright; he heard that