The call, p.5
The Call, page 5
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IN WINTER there would be skating parties on the pond, with a bonfire in the cove at the top, hot cocoa, roasted frankfurters and marshmallows, games of snap-the-whip, sail-skating downwind with a burlap bag on a sprit frame for a sail.
Then, when the ice was a foot thick, came the ice harvesting. And at the ice harvesting, in the winter when David was sixteen, he saw something happen that gave him a model of physical courage for the rest of his life. His testimony, at age sixty-five, was that “whenever I was in danger in China, that picture of my father rose before my eyes, challenging me to be as brave as he.”
There were no refrigerators in those days; cakes of ice were delivered from house to house on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, at ten cents for a fifty-pound cake, which the average icebox could take. For the harvesting, a communal enterprise, various farmers would supply teams of horses in rotation. First a team would clear away the snow with a six-foot scoop steered by two men. Then the ice field would be marked for cutting by a horse-drawn gauge with metal points that scribed the ice in parallel lines, perpendicular to each other, making a grid of rectangles about eighteen inches by two feet. The ice then had to be sawed by hand, with huge-toothed saws six feet long. The broken-off cakes were scooted or floated toward the mouth of a sloping trough at the ice house, where a man would slip a metal cage over a pair of cakes, and then a team of horses would walk out onto the ice, drawing the cage up into the ice house on block and tackle. The ice was stacked inside the house a foot or so from the outside walls, and the gaps were filled with sawdust, which cost twenty-five cents a wagonload at various sawmills. This insulation, which was also eventually spread on the top layer of ice, would keep the remaining cakes intact right through the following summer.
One day in January 1896 it had come to be Brownson Treadup’s turn to supply the team for the afternoon shift of the haul of blocks up the trough. It was three above zero, with an overcast sky and “a wolf-fanged north wind.” David managed to keep warm, for he was manning one of the twenty handsaws. The men sang songs to make a rhythm for their strokes; the bodies heaved in a dance of echelons. From time to time there would be ominous deep-throated cracking sounds—dismissed as something the men called “underfreeze.”
Then suddenly there was a kind of thunder underfoot that did not stop. David looked up to see a huge floe tipping under Custer and Bonaparte, and the horses slid into the water. The sawing ceased. The men gasped and shouted. David saw that his father was safe on firm ice. He had an impression that the horses’ heads, tossing above the water, consisted of nothing but huge eyes and nostrils. Then—no time seemed to have passed—his father was in the water, feeding a rope around Custer’s neck; then one around Bonaparte’s. Then men were hauling his father up on the ice, and others were pulling at the ropes. For the only way to save the horses, David knew from old lore, was to choke them until, heaving breath in but unable to expel it, they would become bloated and would float high so men could—and they now did—roll them out on the ice.
At sixty-five, recalling this episode, David Treadup had no memory of how his father must have been bundled up and taken off to the nearest house to be restored, or how the horses, which came through unharmed, must have been run and rubbed down. He only remembered the ice forming on his father’s beard, and his father’s eyes seeking his own eyes, and Paul’s, and Will’s, with a father’s angry defiance, as if to say, “Could you do that?” “Often when I have prayed,” David wrote, “I have visualized an utterly dependable God with frost like that in his beard and searching, piercing, furious eyes like those.”
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“THERE WAS a break in my life at about seventeen,” David wrote in “Events,”
and I became careless and rebelled at the strictness of my home. I started in school and grew careless during the fall until I was severely ill with blood poisoning. I was confined to the house for three months and was left in a weak condition.
So David moved into a period of stress, prefiguring the crisis that led to his conversion in his sophomore year at Syracuse; the same malady recurred just before his late-life crisis in 1943. We know from the later sickness that the disease was not exactly blood poisoning—a term which in those days, like “virus” in a later time, covered many a mystery—but was osteomyelitis: an inflammation of an area of bone and marrow of the humerus of his left arm, about midway between shoulder and elbow.
During his weeks in bed, a door opened in David’s mind. He had nothing to do but read—a pastime for which the way had been prepared by his mother’s fierce love of books. But it was not his mother who brought this breakthrough. One of his teachers, Maud Chase, who must have been excited by sparks she had seen struck from David’s mind in her classroom, took it on herself to be his librarian, and with brother Paul as intermediary, she sent book after book to the young patient.
For David her choices were like a lottery. She managed to establish in him a firm liking for bad poetry. She bombarded him with volumes by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Bayard Taylor, Henry Richard Stoddard, Richard Watson Gilder. Two slim, poorly edited books of Emily Dickinson’s poems had been published by the time of David’s sickness, but the ripples they caused had apparently not reached Salt Branch; nor do we find in David’s notes any mention of Whitman. Among the appalling false starts in his understanding of China, he noted in his diary after he had gone there, was one put in his way during his illness by Maud Chase: Bret Harte’s most popular poem, about the California Chinaman, Ah Sin, cheating at cards, an effusion which Harte himself called “possibly the worst poem anybody ever wrote”:
…for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain
The Heathen Chinee is peculiar.
Understandably missing from the prose works Maud Chase sent David were the novels of Howells and James, which dealt with social worlds far from the humble realities of Salt Branch. But in those months at home David did make two explosive discoveries: Huckleberry Finn, with its long dream of floating on waters (how he must have been missing his Ecarg!) and, more important, with its powerful message of Huck’s love for Jim, a creature of another race; and Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, with its deep affinities, noted many years later in Treadup’s commonplace books, to Melville’s Typee and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—“searches all, in faraway places,” he wrote, “into the raw and untamed recesses of the Self as set against an Other”—the Parkman through its unashamed yet distanced staring at naked members of yet another race, the Sioux. These two books fed both David’s restlessness and his fascination with whoever might be called a stranger.
In “Events” he wrote:
My arm, in which the blood poisoning was, was left in bad shape and I finally after a year had an operation to remove part of the bone. The wound was kept open with a gauze drain in it for several weeks. Then it was sound. I afterward became ambitious to be strong and took better care of myself. I also took a renewed interest in the Christian life. I have sometimes thought it was a providential sickness.
ABSOLOM CARTER
MAIN STREET, in front of Gavin’s Grain and Seed. Yellowish June daylight. Five boys, all about seventeen years old, lounge in swaggering poses against the wall of the store—hips thrust sideways, arms folded, heads tilted back. Treadup’s right hand, hidden behind his back, grasps a large hub wrench. He has, as each of them has, a sore place on the tip of the middle finger of his right hand, for they have all recently sworn themselves to secrecy with blood from razor cuts there. The young men are all former gulls of the bakery crowd, but they now call themselves by a better bird’s name. They are the Cayuga Eagles.
A farmer drives up in a battered red wagon, hitches his horse, and goes in the store. Young Treadup dimly recognizes him as one who works a place out the Silver Junction road, but does not know his name. When the store’s fly-mesh door slams, the boys look at each other. Treadup, the leader, nods. Casually all five sidle out toward the wagon. The other four screen Treadup, who quickly ducks down by the right rear wheel, applies the wrench, and loosens the hub nut to its last couple of threads. He is up again. No one has seen anything. The five ease back to the wall of the store and wait.
Wonderful! The farmer is buying a big load of things—potash in bags, rolls of tar paper, some milk cans. The boys eagerly offer to help him load up. He gratefully accepts their offer. He unhitches. One of the boys takes the horse’s bridle and guides it as it backs out. The farmer salutes his thanks. A hundred yards along, the right rear wheel of the wagon begins to gollywobble. The driver seems not to notice. Then—beautiful! The wheel careers off on a course of its own, as if it would rather go to Oswego. Slowly, slowly, the bed of the wagon tilts. The farmer throws up his arms. The milk cans sing as they roll off. The horse rears in twisted shafts. The farmer fights the reins at the peak of his wreck. All the goods are in the dust.
The Eagles run around to the far side of the store to let their laughter free.
* * *
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ON JUNE 23 the through passenger “up” train, due in Salt Branch just after noon, was delayed five hours. Late that afternoon word went around town that there had been a derailment of a freight car in a “down” train just west of Silver Junction.
In the middle of the night one of the Eagles lost his nerve. The secrecy-cut on his fingertip all too well healed, he confessed to his parents that just after the band concert the previous night, he had gone down to the depot freight siding with David Treadup and the other boys in the gang, and they had borrowed tools from the yard shed, which was never locked, and David had loosened bolts in the undercarriage of one of the freight cars.
At six the next morning the stationmaster sent a flagman out to the Treadup farm to summon David to the depot. By eight o’clock the whole town knew the news. At about eight fifteen, within a few minutes of each other, two adults showed up at the station to look out for the Treadup boy’s interest. One was Maud Chase, his teacher; the other was Dr. Ferdinand Fosco.
Of Maud Chase, little is known. During David’s sickness she guided his reading, as we have seen, and she now cared enough about him to walk right out of a schoolroom and rush to his defense.
Dr. Fosco, an elderly man with a grand presence, had graduated from the University of Vermont and had emigrated first to Silver Junction, in Cayuga County, and then to Salt Branch. Of the three doctors in the village, he had been the Treadups’ choice as family physician because he was active, as they were, in the Methodist Church. As Sunday school superintendent he had pinned attendance badges on David’s lapel, and he had put in David’s hand, as a prize for memorizing psalms, a Bible which David kept for most of his life, said to have been bound in thin boards of olive wood from the Mount of Olives (David half believed this). On the Sunday school wall hung a large portrait of Dr. Fosco, posed beside a studio tree stump on which sat, as a symbol of the good doctor’s wisdom, a stuffed owl. The doctor had often hired David to do odd jobs around his home. No matter how Christian, how kind, Dr. Fosco may have been, there must have been something special about this young boy, there must have been some metallic glitter of mind behind the things he had casually said to his employer, which had impressed a busy physician enough to make him drop his rounds on sudden notice and have a shot at lawyering for a bad boy.
The outcome of the conference in the depot ticket office was a characteristic one for an intimate village like Salt Branch in those days: The stationmaster entrusted David to whatever correction the teacher and doctor might settle upon.
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THE AGREEMENT Maud Chase and Ferdinand Fosco reached must have surprised and chagrined the railroad man. It was that David was made for a bigger world than Salt Branch. He was bad, they decided, because he was bored; he needed the challenge of better schooling than Salt Branch could offer. (Their charitable diagnosis was surely correct; but much later in life Treadup became aware of eruptions of what he called “my badness”—involuntary outbursts of prankishness and destructiveness, which each time signaled the onset of a period of low spirits.)
But sending David away would take money. Dr. Fosco knew from his own dealings with the Brownson Treadups how poor they were. He went to David’s Uncle Don, the former circus owner, whose bell summoned the faithful to the doctor’s church; doubtless Fosco knew of the childless eccentric’s fostering of David. And between them, in due course, these three oddly assorted angels, Maud Chase, Ferdinand Fosco, and Don Treadup, brought the first great swerve in David’s life, which rescued him from a poverty-racked farm existence and headed him toward a decent education and, eventually, faraway China.
* * *
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IN TURCOTT, that very autumn, an imposing brick-and-stone building with the lines, much reduced in scale but not at all in aspiration, of the Hall of Languages at Syracuse University was rising on five acres of high ground that commanded Turcott village. It was to cost an impressive $27,355.86 (carpenters were paid $1.50 a day that year, masons $2.50, and common laborers, $1.25), and its beams, floors, and millwork were to consume forty thousand board feet of Georgia pine lumber. By early November the capstone of the arch over the entrance was raised into place:
ENDERBURY INSTITUTE 18 FREE SCHOOL 96
The weather snapped cold just then, and for the final bricklaying in the next month the men had to mix gasoline into the mortar and then burn it to keep the mortar from freezing. Workmen slated the roof in January, finished plastering in early March, and hung the bell in the tower on March 31.
There were two sorts of secondary education in that region and time. One was the “academic” school, often privately funded, which prepared students for college or business or teaching; such had been the Enderbury Institute, founded in 1856 by Isaac Enderbury, a native of Watertown, Connecticut, who had settled in Turcott a couple of decades earlier, an energetic and public-spirited citizen who had eventually represented the district in the state legislature. The other kind was the free district school, which typically gave its pupils a fair literacy, and ability to figure and reason well enough to get along as farmers or craftsmen or clerks. In Turcott in 1869 the two had been consolidated into a single entity.
Now opportunely just after David’s delinquency its new building stood spanking and ready, and the three angels decided that this would be the ideal place for him.
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DR. FOSCO broached the idea of the Turcott school to the family.
David’s parents balked. Brownson said he needed the boy’s arms on the farm; especially he needed his aptitude, much greater than that of the other sons, with tools and gear. Just when the boys were coming to the age when they could, at last, give their father’s back a rest, were they to be torn away, one by one?
As soon as Hannah learned that Don Treadup was involved in the plan, she denounced it as “a conspiracy to kidnap my son.” She would never allow such a crime, she said.
And David, even though he knew he was on probation to Fosco and Chase, did not want to leave Salt Branch. It would mean deserting his companion Renny Paxon and the Eagles; he would be cut off from church social events, choir practice, organ pumping, Gertrude Jonson, Cassie Berns. And what about his rowboat?
David took refuge in his parents’ bristling resistance—until, one day, Dr. Fosco asked him to come to his house in the village to mow and prune. Dr. Fosco, with the intuition of a family doctor of those days, refrained from playing on David’s guilt over his gang’s dangerous “jokes,” and instead touched the nerve ends of David’s ambition, which the illness—perhaps his reading—had laid bare.
“I went home that day on fire,” David wrote in “Search.” “I was going to whip the world.”
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DAVID went to see the school, and it was on the day of that visit that he met a man who was to be one of the two most important models for his future life as a missionary.
“The first sight I had of Mr. Carter,” David wrote in a letter to brother Paul in 1918 (after the teacher had been killed by a locomotive, when his Ford stalled at a track crossing),
was in the science room on the day I inspected the school, or vice versa, the school inspected me. He was wearing a green celluloid eyeshade and he had rubber sleeveguards holding up his sleeves. He picked up a fifty-pound wooden case for beakers and test tubes by one handle as if it were a teacup. Said to myself: “David if you come here to school, this is a person to whom you will have to be polite.” He was 28 or 29, but from my perspective then he was middle-aged—at his prime—in mental powers, in magnetism, in wisdom. When he began to speak! O he was going to be so much more than my match—as I came to know so well in my terms under his tutelage. He was a polymath. He remembered every word of every book he had ever read. He had an off eye—a mote, or a wall eye rather—and sometimes you could not tell whether he was looking past you or right through you. He did not need to look at the surface of you because he already knew as much about your innermost secrets as he did about those of Augustus, Charlemagne, Copernicus, Shakespeare, the vireo, the snapdragon, sulphur brimstone, and the fleas on your dog—in other words, of every thing. Everything. Everything. Could I ever know the thousandth part of what he knew?
