Into The Bright Sunshine Young Hubert Humphrey and The Fight For Civil Rights Samuel G Freedman Full Chapter
Into The Bright Sunshine Young Hubert Humphrey and The Fight For Civil Rights Samuel G Freedman Full Chapter
Into The Bright Sunshine Young Hubert Humphrey and The Fight For Civil Rights Samuel G Freedman Full Chapter
Small Victories
The Real World, of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School
The Inheritance
How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond
⋆⋆⋆
Dying Words
The AIDS Reporting of Jeff Schmalz and How It Transformed The New York Times
(Companion book to the public radio documentary produced by Kerry Donahue)
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2023934131
ISBN 978–0–19–753519–6
eISBN 978–0–19–753520–2
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197535196.001.0001
To you, again, my bashert,
Christia Chana Blomquist Freedman
This book began with your question
*
And in memory of two mentors whom I lost along the way
Alice Mayhew, 1932–2020
Jim Podgers, 1950–2018
True freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear
And, with heart and hand, to be
Earnest to make others free!
—Stanzas of Freedom, James Russell Lowell
CONTENTS
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
May 22, 1977
Hubert Humphrey, a fallen hero and a dying man, rose on rickety
legs to approach the podium of the Philadelphia Convention Hall, his
pulpit for the commencement address at the University of
Pennsylvania. He clutched a sheaf of paper with his speech for the
occasion, typed and double-spaced by an assistant from his
extemporaneous dictation, and then marked up in pencil by
Humphrey himself. A note on the first page, circled to draw
particular attention, read simply, “30 years ago—Here.” In this place,
at that time, twenty-nine years earlier to be precise, he had made
history.
From the dais now, Humphrey beheld five thousand impending
graduates, an ebony sea of gowns and mortarboards, broken by one
iconoclast in a homemade crown, two in ribboned bonnets, and
another whose headgear bore the masking-tape message “HI MA
PA.” In the horseshoe curve of the arena’s double balcony loomed
eight thousand parents and siblings, children, and friends. Wearing
shirtsleeves and cotton shifts amid the stale heat, they looked like
pale confetti from where Humphrey stood, and their flash cameras
flickered away, a constellation of pinpricks.
The tableau stirred Humphrey’s memories of the Democratic
National Convention on July 14, 1948: the same sweltering air inside
the vast hall, the same packed seats and bustling lobby, the same
hum of expectancy at the words he was about to utter. All these
years later, Humphrey was standing in very nearly the identical spot.
Since that afternoon in 1948 had placed him on the national
stage, Humphrey had assembled credentials more than
commensurate with this day’s hortatory role: twenty-three years in
the U.S. Senate, four as vice president to Lyndon Johnson, three
times a candidate for his party’s nomination for president, and one
very narrow loss as its candidate. In Humphrey’s years as arguably
the nation’s preeminent liberal politician, he had pressed for the
United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate disarmament amid
the nuclear standoff of the Cold War, introduced the legislation that
created and indeed named the Peace Corps, and helped to floor-
manage the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Relentlessly
energetic, effusive to a fault, he practiced what he called “the
politics of joy.”1
Even so, five days shy of his sixty-sixth birthday, Humphrey was a
dynamo diminished. Two cancers were ravaging him, one blighting
his body and the other his legacy. As if entwined, each affliction had
been inexorably growing over the preceding decade. Nineteen sixty-
seven was the year when the escalating war in Vietnam, which
Humphrey dutifully supported, deployed nearly half a million
American soldiers and took more than ten thousand American lives.
It was the year of the “Long Hot Summer,” when Black Americans in
more than 150 cities erupted with uprisings against the police
violence and economic inequality that persisted regardless of civil
rights laws. And it was the year when Hubert Humphrey first noticed
that his urine was stained with blood.
Of the team of doctors who examined Humphrey, only one
warned of incipient cancer, and he was overruled.2 The decision
suited Humphrey’s congenital optimism and his yearning for the
presidency, and he went through the 1968 campaign assuming good
health. The next year, a biopsy confirmed evidence of bladder
cancer, and after four more years without Humphrey having either
symptoms or treatment, doctors discovered a spot of malignant
tissue termed “microinvasive.” The word meant that the rogue cells
could sink roots and spread, like the plagues of thistle that overran
the wheat fields of Humphrey’s prairie childhood. Subsequent rounds
of radiation and chemotherapy, a regimen that Humphrey described
as “the worst experience of my life,” bought him three years of
remission, and with it the false hope of full recovery.
For in the fall of 1976, Humphrey again spied blood in his urine,
and a biopsy confirmed that the bladder cancer, far from defeated,
was expanding. Humphrey submitted to the harsh and logical option
of having his bladder removed and chemotherapy resumed. For
public consumption, wearing a mask of willed buoyancy, Humphrey
declared himself fully cured. Newspaper accounts of his stay at
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center told of him “prodding
patients out of their wheelchairs, shaking hands with everyone in
sight and generally infusing gaiety and hope into a normally somber
ward.”3
In fact, the disease had already invaded Humphrey’s lymph
nodes, the staging areas for it to advance with one nearly certain
result. On the days when Humphrey received chemotherapy, he was
so weak, and perhaps so humiliated, that a young aide had to roll
him up into a blanket and carry him between the senator’s car and
the Bethesda naval hospital.4 Humphrey was both impotent and
incontinent now and reduced to relieving himself through a port in
his abdomen into a collection bag. In one of the rare moments when
private truth slipped out, he described his cancer as “a thief in the
night that can stab you in the back.”5
The decline of Humphrey’s health coincided with the degradation
of his public image. Barely had Humphrey joined Johnson’s White
House than the musical satirist Tom Lehrer titled one song on his
Top 20 1965 album That Was the Year That Was, “Whatever Became
of Hubert?” “Once a fiery liberal spirit,” Lehrer sang in answer to his
own question, “Ah, but now when he speaks, he must clear it.” The
clearance, Lehrer’s sophisticated listeners understood, had to come
from Lyndon Johnson, and its price was Humphrey’s cheerleading for
the Vietnam War.
Humphrey received the presidential nomination in 1968 less by
competing for it rather than by having it delivered to him by tragic
circumstance and machine manipulation: Johnson’s decision in
March 1968 not to run for re-election; the assassination in June of
the next front runner, Robert F. Kennedy; and a coronation by the
centrist party establishment at a Chicago convention sullied by a
police rampage against antiwar protestors. Humphrey campaigned
under the twin burdens of an increasingly unpopular war and the
televised beating of young activists. At a more personal level, his
erstwhile protégé Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesota senator who was
revered on the left for his antiwar insurgency against Johnson in the
early primaries, withheld his vital endorsement of Humphrey until it
was too late to matter.
In defeat, Humphrey returned to the University of Minnesota, his
alma mater, where the political science faculty rejected his
appointment, ostensibly because he had never finished his doctoral
degree. Even after the university managed to place Humphrey in a
category of non-traditional faculty, the professors there banned him
from their social club, the Thirty-Niners.6
When voters returned Humphrey to the U.S. Senate in 1971, it
was as a freshman, starting over at the bottom of the seniority
totem pole. And when he vied again for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 1972, he lost to another protégé, George McGovern,
the senator from South Dakota whose opposition to the Vietnam
War made him an idealistic idol to his youthful legions. Even more
humiliating, Humphrey’s trademark ebullience now looked frenetic
and desperate. One bard of the counterculture, Hunter S. Thompson
of Rolling Stone, laid into Humphrey with particular rhetorical relish.
To Thompson’s unsparing eye, Humphrey was “a treacherous,
gutless old ward-heeler,” “a hack and a fool,” who “talks like an
eighty-year-old woman who just discovered speed.” And in this insult
that beyond all others clung in the popular memory, he “campaigned
like a rat in heat.”7
The calumnies were hardly the exclusive property of Woodstock
Nation. Stewart Alsop, a grandee among Washington columnists,
reiterated some of Thompson’s barbs in Newsweek. Theodore H.
White, American journalism’s authoritative chronicler of presidential
campaigns, pronounced that Humphrey “had been part of the
scenery too long, as long as Richard Nixon, and had become to the
young and the press a political cartoon.”8
By the time the 1976 presidential campaign began, Humphrey
was sick enough, dispirited enough, or both to stay out of it. His
home city of Minneapolis, which he had made a national model of
liberalism as mayor, was about to re-elect a law-and-order ex-cop
named Charles Stenvig for his third term as mayor in yet one more
example of white backlash against racial progress. Another of
Humphrey’s protégés, Senator Walter Mondale, vaulted past him into
the national spotlight as the incoming vice president for Jimmy
Carter. During the week of their inauguration, Humphrey was
vomiting from the effects of chemotherapy.9
When Congress convened in January 1977, Humphrey tried one
last race—running to be Senate Majority Leader. Even his longtime
allies in the AFL-CIO let their opposition privately be known because
he was “starting to slip fast.”10 Facing certain defeat, Humphrey
withdrew. And the cruelest part of the outcome was assenting to the
senator who captured the prize by acclamation. Robert Byrd of West
Virginia was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, a filibustering foe
of civil rights legislation, and the very embodiment of the Jim Crow
system that Humphrey had devoted his adult life to dismantling.
All of these blows, and the prospect of his own demise, put
Humphrey in an uncharacteristically pensive mood—more than just
ruminative, closer to depressed. After nearly thirty years in national
politics, he found himself wondering what it had all been for.
“I always try to be a man of the present and hopefully of the
future,” he wrote in early 1976 to Eugenie Anderson, a career
diplomat and longtime friend. “I am, of course, strengthened and
inspired by some of the achievements of the yesterdays; but also a
person is sobered and tempered by some of the other experiences
that didn’t produce such favorable results. I hope the experience
that I have had has given me some sense of judgment and a bit of
wisdom.”11
By January 23, 1977, when Humphrey wrote to Anderson again in
the wake of cancer surgery and the failed bid to become majority
leader, his tone was even more despairing: “I’m no child and I surely
am not naive, but I do feel that some of those I helped so much
might have been a little more loyal. But I suppose it’s part of human
weakness so why worry about it. That’s all for now.”12
In the present moment, standing before the imminent Penn
graduates and their doting families, Humphrey looked visibly
weathered, even from a distance. His gown dangled from sloping,
bony shoulders as if off a coat hanger. His skin had a grayish hue,
the same color as the wispy hair and eyebrows just starting to grow
back with the cessation of chemotherapy. His cheeks, the tireless
bellows for so many speeches, were shrunken back into the bone.
His chin jutted, a promontory.
Even for this celebratory occasion, even on the day he would
receive an honorary doctorate, Humphrey was revisiting a place not
only of triumph but rebuke. He had been picketed and heckled by
antiwar protestors in this very hall in 1965, with one placard asking,
“How Much Did You Sell Your Soul for Hubert?” During a presidential
campaign rally in Philadelphia in 1968, the signs called him
“murderer” and “killer.” And after a speech on the Penn campus
during the 1972 primary race against McGovern was disrupted by
everything from paper airplanes to chants of “Dump the Hump,”
Humphrey lamented, “I’ve been to 192 campuses, but I’ve never
had anything like this.”13
So as he edged into his commencement address, Humphrey held
off from the prepared text, with its survey of international affairs and
its appeal for youthful idealism. He led instead with jokes that,
depending how one chose to hear them, sounded either self-effacing
or self-lacerating. They had the aspect of a perpetual victim mocking
himself before any bully could, as if controlling the blow might limit
the pain. “I’ve given more speeches than any man ought to be
permitted to,” Humphrey said. “I have bored more people over a
longer period of time than any man ought to be permitted to.” Then
he recalled his own graduation from the University of Minnesota in
1939 and said, “For the life of me, I can’t remember what the
commencement speaker said, and I’ll bet you that when you leave
here, at least a year from now, you’re gonna say, ‘Who was that
fellow? What did he say?’ ”14
Humphrey had the crowd laughing now, not in ridicule, but a kind
of affable affinity. Maybe because the Vietnam War was over at last.
Maybe because the political villain of the age was Nixon. Maybe
because people felt pity for Humphrey’s illness or some pang of
conscience about the scorn he had endured. Whatever the reason,
Humphrey seized the interval of good will and pivoted into a matter
of substance and memory.
“I’ve been reminded . . . of the day I was here in July nineteen
hundred and forty-eight,” he said, his voice reedy and unforced.
“Boy, it was hot, in more ways than one. I was the young mayor of
the city of Minneapolis . . . but in my heart, I had something that I
wanted to tell my fellow partisans, and I did.”
What Humphrey said on that day preceded the Supreme Court’s
decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus
boycott led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the two events
commonly and incorrectly understood as the beginnings of the civil
rights movement. What he said on that day anticipated the wave of
civil rights legislation that Lyndon Johnson would push through
Congress in the 1960s, addressing the unfinished business of
emancipation. What he said on that day set into motion the partisan
realignment that defines American politics right up through the
present.
What he said on that day—with Black marchers outside the
Convention Hall threatening mass draft resistance against the
segregated armed forces, with Southern delegates inside the
building vowing mutiny against such equal rights, with the
incumbent president and impending nominee, Harry Truman,
seething about this upstart mayor’s temerity—followed on two
sentences.
“Because of my profound belief that we have a challenging task
to do here,” Humphrey had declared from the convention podium,
“because good conscience, decent morality demands it, I feel I must
rise at this time to support a report, a minority report, a report that
spells out our democracy.
“It is a report,” he continued, “on the greatest issue of civil
rights.”15
CHAPTER 1
BEYOND THE MERIDIAN
1922–1931
Fifteen years after the Civil War ended in Confederate surrender and
the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the federal census
recorded the residents of John T. Cotton’s home in the rolling
pastureland of central Kentucky. Among them was a farm laborer
named Clay Shipman, twenty-six years old, and his wife Ellen, a cook
who was four years his junior. The enumerator categorized the
Shipmans as “mulatto,” a designation of inferior racial caste and the
evidence, too, of the slave master atrocities that had been inflicted
upon their forebears.
Even with the war’s resolution, when Black citizenship should
have been a settled matter, Kentucky resisted granting both equal
rights and equal protection across the color line. Though it had been
a slave state, Kentucky never seceded from the Union, and so
federal troops were not deployed there as elsewhere in the South to
enforce Reconstruction. The state’s General Assembly rejected the
Thirteenth Amendment altogether. Ku Klux Klan vigilantes attacked
Black churches and freedmen’s schools, assaulted Black veterans of
the Union Army, and, in one instance, besieged a large iron foundry
to force the expulsion of its Black workers. No sooner had freed
Blacks helped to elect narrowly a Republican government in Boyle
County, where the Shipmans lived, than a series of lynchings
erupted and the surrounding region went on to lead the state in that
grim statistic.1 A federal official trying to resettle liberated Blacks in
the county faced such hostility that he declared, “Satan is loose in
Ky.”2
By the middle of the 1880s, Clay and Ellen Shipman had four
children, ranging from toddler to nearly teenager, and not a single
material object worth taxation. They continued to subsist on Clay’s
take from farm work, part of it in the form of provisions rather than
cash wages, and what Ellen could make hiring herself out to white
peoples’ kitchens. John Cotton, for his part, descended from a
slaveholding family that still owned hundreds of acres of land for
grain, horses, and cattle.
In all likelihood, the Shipmans were hearing of those several
thousand Black people from Kentucky and Tennessee, among other
Southern states, who had headed to the western plains a few years
prior, calling themselves Exodusters. The Shipmans decided to join
them, taking aim at a section of northeastern Nebraska, Madison
County to be precise, that had just been connected in 1880 to the
transcontinental railroad. There was land there waiting to be
homesteaded, land from which the American army had driven the
Pawnees.
It is possible that the Shipmans traveled by horse-drawn wagon.
It is possible they traveled on foot. It is possible, though improbable,
they somehow gathered the necessary money to travel on the Union
Pacific. Sometime and somewhere in that journey, Ellen evidently
died, because all mentions of her in the public record cease. By the
decade’s end, Clay and his children had settled on a farm several
miles outside the small town of Battle Creek, Nebraska. Thus
established, Clay married for a second time in 1889, wedding a
German immigrant nearly a dozen years his junior who would bear
five children, all of them capable of passing as white.
Besides running his own farm, Clay ultimately managed to buy
and sell 120 acres of land, and also to take regular side work on
road-building teams.3 Of the children from his first marriage, his
Black children, it was the youngest one, a son named Otis, who
picked up the trade. The 1910 census found Otis in Laramie,
Wyoming, twenty-six years old and working as a teamster. A decade
later, he and his wife Mollie and their two daughters were living in
Omaha, which then had the largest Black community of any Western
city except Los Angeles. Along with his unmarried older brother
Leslie, Otis formed a company that graded land for the roads and
rails spreading veinlike across the plains. Leslie mostly oversaw the
office, and Otis led the crews—one year over in Yorktown, Iowa, the
next in Elm Creek, Nebraska, and, in the summer of 1922, on a
rutted, sun-cracked dirt track just outside Doland, South Dakota, a
village of six hundred marooned in the state’s eastern grasslands.
There, on an August afternoon, the son of a Black man once
enslaved met the white son of Doland’s resident idealist.
The boy, Hubert Humphrey, was a few months past his eleventh
birthday, freckled and fair-skinned and a little bit feeble by the
standards of the frontier. He had barely survived the influenza
pandemic of 1918 and in chillier weather wore a fleece tunic to
protect his weakened lungs. The folks in Doland all knew him as
“Pink” or “Pinky,” a nickname that referred to the way his mother
had dressed him as a toddler. And he was so awkward on his gangly
legs that people joked about how often he stumbled.4
In a community that venerated the farmer and hunter, men who
contended with nature, Hubert was more of an indoor creature, the
prodigy in his grade school class and the adoring son of a bookish
father who ran the local drugstore. One of Hubert’s jobs there was
to peddle all the newspapers, some shipped from the distant East
and others printed close to home. So it probably had not escaped his
inquiring eye when Doland’s weekly paper, the Times-Record,
recently published this item:
The highway construction crew is at work three miles west of town and are
making good time. Those who have driven over the road say the work is
about the best they ever saw in the state. The contractor is a negro [sic] and
is doing the work exactly as called for in the specifications.5
“Too many silk shirts; not enough blue flannel ones. . . . Too many satin-
upholstered limousines; not enough cows. . . . Too much oil stock; not
enough savings accounts. . . . Too much of the spirit of ‘get while the getting’s
good’; not enough of the old-fashioned Christianity.”26
H. H.’s own wife was one of those old-fashioned Christians, insisting they send
their children to church services and Sunday school, despite his freethinking
blasphemy. Two years after South Dakota enacted female suffrage, Christine
cast her first presidential vote for the Republican candidate, Warren Harding.
H. H. had his own idea of a pulpit. In fact, he had two: his store
and his home. Around the soda fountain in his drugstore, he
regularly convened what passed for the elite of an egalitarian town:
Zarnecke the lawyer, Doc Sherwood, the bankers Brown and George
Gross. He welcomed the farmers, too, always offering free coffee to
loosen up their taciturn tongues. With Prohibition having shuttered
Doland’s only saloon, men in search of conversation and
camaraderie had few options better than Humphrey’s drugstore. It
was, in the words of one, “the mecca of sophistication.”27 H. H.
radiated enough charm and integrity to win election to the city
council in 1917, the first of his four two-year terms. Even so, there
was a certain amount of behind-the-scenes grousing about the
“bombastic” druggist whose voice “filled the whole store.”28
Riding the crest of Wheat Belt bounty, H. H. was finally able to
buy a home, and it was a grand one in a town of build-it-yourself
bungalows from the Sears catalog. On the day after Christmas of
1918, H. H. paid about $4,50029 for a two-story four-square house
that had been custom designed for its original owner. The dining
room boasted oak archways and leaded windows and a built-in
stained-glass buffet. The living-room ceiling was decorated with
stencils of flowers and birds.30 A small orchard of apples and plums
flanked the house. And, most extravagantly of all, nearly four
hundred miles from Lake Superior and more than a thousand miles
from any ocean, the Humphrey home was topped by a widow’s walk.
H. H. created his sacred place in the library, packing its shelves
end-to-end with history books, complete sets of Shakespeare and
Dickens, and albums of classical music, his latest passion. When he
got home each night from the drugstore, normally around ten
o’clock, he summoned his children out of their beds for his secular
sermons. The congregation now numbered four, with daughters
Frances (born in 1914) and Fern (1917) joining their older brothers
Ralph and Hubert. H. H.’s goal for the children, and most especially
for his precocious namesake, was to be “raised in the atmosphere of
the common man, yet with a cultural background unexcelled by the
most privileged.”31
Much as his mother had held forth during his own childhood, H.
H. now assumed the declamatory role. Twice a year, he read aloud
Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech. He would put his two favorites,
Hubert and Frances, on his lap as he recited Woodrow Wilson’s
“Fourteen Points,” the principles for peacemaking after the Great
War.32 H. H. quoted favorite passages from Lincoln and lectured
from Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. More temporal lessons about national politics came from
newspaper columns, and H. H. sometimes punctuated them with the
admonition to his most devoted listener, “You should know this,
Hubert. It might affect your life someday.”33 The seminars only
ended when Christine appeared at the library portal to plead with H.
H., “Let the children get some rest.”34
The paternal education of Hubert, though, only paused for the
necessity of sleep. It resumed each afternoon when school let out
and Hubert reported to the drugstore for duty. If Hubert ever had an
idle moment between serving sodas and washing dishes in those
vocational hours before dinner at home, H. H. would rouse him with
the command, “Ac-ti-vi-ty, ac-ti-vi-ty.”35 From his perch at the
counter, Hubert could eavesdrop on H. H.’s conversations with
customers, and it struck the boy how his father treated the farmers
—smelling of sweat and harness oil, spiky bits of wheat stuck in their
hair, gear grease staining their hands—just as respectfully as he did
the lawyer and doctor. “High-hatting any/ one,” H. H. put it, “was
strictly taboo.”36
The rule applied most indelibly to Hubert’s classmates. As narrow
as the range of social class was in humble, homogenous Doland, a
veneer of professional people hovered above the broad middle, and
a slice of the poor languished beneath it. Their neighborhood was
called Shantytown.37 On the east side of Doland, separated from the
rest by a creek, the area got its name because much of the housing
there still consisted of the kind of claim shanties that the
homesteaders of the 1880s had thrown together with foot-wide
wood planks. By the 1920s, decades of severe weather and itinerant
inhabitation later, the shacks belonged mostly to farm laborers, some
with families. Unlike most homes in Doland, their dwellings rarely
had running water and still used backyard privies.38 Tar paper
patched the leaky roofs and newspaper insulated the walls.
Christine Humphrey was characteristically uneasy about Hubert
having friends there, much as she had been about his hanging
around with the Black road crew, and H. H. just as characteristically
urged the boy on. H. H. insisted that the ragamuffins of Shantytown
be invited to Hubert’s birthday parties in the stately four-square
house. On a less celebratory day, Hubert brought a Shantytown
playmate into the family drugstore and informed H. H., “Jonathan
here doesn’t have any shoes, and his feet are so cold, they’re blue.”
H. H. hit the NO SALE key on the cash register, extracted a handful
of bills, and took Jonathan to a dry-goods store down Main Street for
a set of heavy boots and wool socks. This was not an act of charity,
H. H. emphasized to his son, but of “elemental justice.”39
⋆⋆⋆
The ninety-eighth meridian runs almost exactly through Doland.
That geographical fact carried profound meaning for the scientists of
the early twentieth century who were just beginning to study the
vicissitudes of agriculture in the Great Plains. The meridian carved a
seemingly monotonous landscape into two versions and two
destinies. East of it, rain fell and crops grew reliably; west of it,
neither could be assumed. “At this fault the ways of life and living
changed,” one scholar put it, aptly employing a seismological
metaphor. “Practically every institution that was carried across it was
either broken and remade or else greatly altered.”40
During the 1880s, soon after settlers first broke the sod west of
Doland, the soil was so enriched by millennia of buried carbon that
wheat flourished. The decade happened to be a relatively wet one,
too, lending seeming confirmation to the land promoters’ promise
that cutting the prairie’s crust would conjure the rain. The wartime
boom of the 1910s fed the delusion of dependable bounty.
Good luck, however, did nothing to move the meridian or to alter
the climatic realities. Doland received about twenty inches of rain a
year, barely enough to sustain what was called “dry farming,” which
meant trying to draw on every molecule of water stored in the soil to
augment the insufficiency of what fell from the sky. Just 150 miles
east, the yearly rainfall reached about thirty inches, providing an
essential margin to mitigate nature’s whims.
While the Doland area as a whole was perched on the precipice
between fecundity and desolation, each farm operated as an
intricate contraption of interlocking parts. The failure of any one
element imperiled the entire apparatus, which was to say a family’s
financial survival. The typical farm of 320 or 640 acres grew wheat
to sell, corn to feed hogs, hay to nourish cows, and chickens to lay
eggs. A vegetable garden supplied the kitchen table, and the “egg
money” gleaned from selling crates of them at the creamery filled
the household till. The modest ideal was to end the harvest with
wheat seed in reserve for the next spring’s planting, a year’s worth
of hay in the barn, a few smoked hams from slaughtered hogs
socked away in airtight cans, and enough healthy livestock to sell a
couple head for money to pay the property tax and mortgage and
buy everyone in the family one set of new clothes.41 “There is
nothing new on the farm,” wrote one chronicler. “We know it all
intimately—the long hours, the sweaty, stinking heavy underwear,
the debt and the mortgage, the way it feels to drag in at twilight
after a day in the field and to sit on the doorstep and pull from our
aching feet our brogan shoes before we eat the coarse evening
meal.”42
For the people of Doland, and for the farmers on the outskirts
whose success or failure ordained the town’s, 1920 began with the
appearance of a record-breaking year, a year to banish all the
lingering doubts. The rains came regularly. The bushel price for
wheat at the Doland depot stood at $2.40, the most it had ever
been.43 South Dakota had ended 1919 with the highest per capita
income of any state, $909.44 Ordinarily frugal people felt confident
spending nearly twice that on a new Studebaker. Farmers borrowed
against the escalating value of their land, sinking the cash into
gasoline tractors to replace their horse-drawn plows. For his part, H.
H. splurged on a two-week vacation in the Upper Midwest’s big city
of Minneapolis with his family.
Then, for reasons both nearby and distant, the bubble began to
leak. Congress allowed the federal law authorizing price supports for
wheat to expire. The breadbasket countries of Western Europe, at
peace again, sowed and reaped their own crops. The American
military decommissioned millions of soldiers, removing yet another
market for domestic grain. With all those forces driving wheat prices
downward, the Federal Reserve grew concerned that banks in
farming regions had overextended themselves and pressed them to
call in loans. The Fed simultaneously raised the interest rate it
charged major banks from four percent in 1919 to seven percent in
1920, further tightening the vise on borrowers. “The bank was the
first refuge of the distressed farmer,” as a federal report would later
put it, but in the year 1920, 35 banks closed in the Federal Reserve
district covering about 250 in Minnesota, Montana, and both
Dakotas.45
Meanwhile, as spring turned into summer, the winds blew into
Doland from the south. Most years, that weather pattern was
perfectly normal; like the migrant threshing crews, the seasonal
winds moved from Texas to Saskatchewan. But in 1920, as in a
handful of similarly hexed years in the past quarter-century, those
winds carried an inordinate amount of Puccinia graminis, a fungus
more commonly known and feared by wheat farmers as stem rust.
The stem rust arrived in June and July, those months when the
spring wheat crop was just flowering. Spores attached to the stem of
a plant, and in warm, damp weather they germinated into the red
pustules that gave the fungus its colloquial name. Like a leech or a
tick or a tapeworm, those parasites of the animal kingdom, stem
rust latched onto another living thing to nourish itself. It sank a kind
of fungal spear called haustoria into the wheat stem and sucked out
the nutrition—nitrogen, proteins, water—before the plant could rise
upward into a stalk. Without food, wheat starved.
In untroubled years, wheat would reach chest-high by harvest
time. Stalks shimmied in the wind, a faint hiss issuing from the
vibrating leaves. The fields gave off a sweet, almost nutty, smell. In
the years of stem rust, like 1920, the stems would be so weakened
within a few days of attack that they would break and topple over
—“lodged” in farmer parlance. The threshing crews who made their
way through the afflicted plants would end their days so covered in
stem rust they called it “red rain.” At the worst, a field that could
yield forty bushels an acre might produce barely five.46
Stem rust spoiled fully one-fifth of South Dakota’s wheat crop in
1920, a toll that would not be surpassed for fifteen years.47 The
damaged land, in turn, served as a vacuum to be filled by sow
thistle, a perennial plant that sank roots as much as ten feet deep,
enabling it to thrive even in dry years, and spread its seeds as easily
as dandelion tufts on the persistent winds. “It takes over,” a
reference book about South Dakota weeds put it, “and smothers
farm crops.”48 Surveying its flowers and leaves, farmers called sow
thistle the “yellow peril” and an “invading horde,” conflating the era’s
anti-immigrant sentiment with an ecological scourge.49
Sow thistle and similarly aggressive Russian thistle—tumbleweed
by any other name—afforded a feast for South Dakota’s native
jackrabbits. Their insatiable appetites also turned to what remained
of the legitimate crops, which they would feast on down to the
stubble. It was said, with a mix of exasperation and awe, that a
jackrabbit could eat as much as a horse. And no matter how often
farmers assembled crews to shoot or club the scavengers, their
number only seemed to grow.
So as 1920 wound toward its end, the wheat lands of South
Dakota resembled Egypt in the time of Joseph’s prophecy—fat years
brutally ended by lean years. It had its own version, too, of the
plagues enumerated in the Book of Exodus, from stem rust to sow
thistle to jackrabbits.
By April 1921, the bushel price of wheat at the Doland depot had
slumped to $1.25, barely half what it had been a year earlier. South
Dakota’s per capita income, the highest of any state at $909 in 1919,
plunged two years later to $312, second worst in the nation.50 For
the individual farmers outside Doland and elsewhere in the so-called
Wheat Belt, the precariously interdependent household economy fell
into pieces. The wheat that farmers salvaged was fetching a paltry
price, and so they sold livestock to balance the books, a stopgap
measure that merely shunted an ever-more-dire problem into the
next growing season. Farmers who had taken loans when crop prices
were soaring and land value was surging no longer had the means
of paying their debts, and the ads for foreclosure auctions started to
pop up in the pages of Doland’s Times-Record.
These were the people who gave H. H. business at the drugstore.
Their purchases paid for the four-square house. Their profligate
ways in the boom years had been matched by H. H.’s own, the way
he stocked his store with diamond rings and Victrolas and radios,
such luxuries. Now the farmers’ misery inevitably became H. H.’s as
well. They paid him with a side of beef or a clutch of chickens, which
Christine would then transform into chicken-salad sandwiches to be
sold at the soda fountain. Or else those farmers just depended on
the credit H. H. advanced them, partly out of compassion and partly
for lack of any better choice.
With his nightly orations to his children, with his kindness to
needier people like Hubert’s friend Jonathan, H. H. aspired to ignore
the quicksand on which he was standing. The very trait that made
him a proud, unbowed dissident in his politics, that absolute faith in
his own judgment, also made him stick to the “marble floor”
pretensions of his store. His advertisements for it epitomized a willful
optimism that barely papered over impending desperation:
These are the days that try men’s souls, the heavy laden and financially
distressed will at this time shrink. But remember that he who stands it now
will reap a harvest worthy of their efforts.51
Brace up! Brush up! Think up! And you will get up.
Think down! Look down! Act down! And you will stay down.
Paint your face with a smile, advertise that you are a success, then think and
work for it.52
⋆⋆⋆
In the weeks after that teasingly clement day when H. H. sold the
four-square house, the weather turned cruel. Heavy snow fell and
days later melted, swamping the rural dirt roads and cutting off
farmers from Doland. A chill, soaking rain ruined Thanksgiving. Then
the temperature sank, and even the new gravel road of Highway 212
froze up. Typically for the bedeviled year of 1922, all the
precipitation had arrived months too late to save the crops.
The growing season of 1923 brought no relief. In the summer
heat, workhorses by the dozen died in the fields. Anthrax broke out
among cattle. Prices for wheat sagged so low, dropping to seventy-
five cents a bushel by September, that farmers fed the grain to their
chickens and hogs rather than sell it at a loss. The Times-Record, in
a front-page commentary, advised farmers to stop planting
altogether: “At the present price it is a losing venture except for the
speculators who are making more money than the man who grows
the grain.”60
Into the climate of despair arrived yet another opportunistic and
invasive species—not sow thistle or tumbleweed, not jackrabbits, but
the hooded knights of the Ku Klux Klan. As the Klan spread into the
North in the 1920s, for a time controlling the state of Indiana and
the city of Denver, it opened klaverns across South Dakota, some as
close to Doland as the county seat of Redfield and the railroad hub
of Huron.61 While South Dakota offered little in the way of Black
people for the Klan to terrorize, there being only 832 in a state of
637,000 in 1920, the presence of Catholics and immigrants from
Eastern and Southern Europe sufficed for scapegoats. Taking
advantage of the economic distress in the Wheat Belt, building on
the bond of fundamentalist Christianity, and pragmatically paying
members for recruiting their neighbors, the Klan presented itself as
utterly mainstream, in the words of one flyer, “Pro-American, Pro-
Gentile, Pro-White and Protestant.”62
By the hundreds, Klan members marched and rallied from Rapid
City on the far side of the Black Hills to Sioux City on the Minnesota
border. They burned crosses in Yankton, whose Black community of
about 115 was the largest in the state.63 One night in mid-August
1923, it was Doland’s turn, with a cross set aflame on the outskirts
of town.64 The knights’ object could have been the Catholics in
nearby Turton. It could have been the “Rooshins” of the Hutterite
colonies with their communal, pacifist version of Protestant faith.
Whatever its purpose, the Klan’s display was not lost on H. H.,
who was already an alien figure with his freethinking ways and
liberal politics. The approach of berobed hatred added one more
element of danger to the growing list he faced. With his regular
customers reeling from the worsening farm crisis, H. H. took to
pushing practical items—house paint, hot-water bottles, rat poison.
He enrolled in a veterinary course to learn how to concoct his own
medicines for farm animals, driving out into the countryside to
administer doses at a dime apiece. Things could have been worse;
the Riley furniture store, which was upstairs from H. H.’s drugstore,
was accepting corn in lieu of cash by the fall of 1923.65 It closed
early the next year.
H. H. vested his favored son with the adult responsibilities of
tracking the drugstore’s inventory and sterilizing the syringes used
for animal serums.66 Outside the store, Hubert earned three dollars
a day during hunting season flushing pheasants out of the brush for
shooting teams. He even sold gopher tails on the streets of Redfield
for two bucks apiece. By age twelve, Hubert was buying his own
clothes, saving his own money, all too aware of his father’s limited
ability to support the family.
Hubert’s maturation included a continuing political education from
his father. H. H. began nine months as Doland’s acting mayor in July
1923, followed by election as city council president, more or less the
high points of his local political career. He brought Hubert along to
the council meetings, where, as Hubert later recalled, “He would . . .
put me in a chair by the corner window, and then he’d do battle,
hour after hour. Toward the latter part of the evenings, I’d doze off,
but I’d wake up when Dad hit another climax.”67 The most
memorable involved H. H.’s futile fight against a plan to sell the
municipally owned electric company into private hands. The lesson
Hubert extracted was the virtue of battling, even in defeat, for a
righteous cause.
Indeed, Hubert was growing into the contours of his father’s
personality with its indomitable optimism. Put another way, he was
learning how to avert his eyes from the travails of the household,
including H. H.’s delusions of grandeur, by hurling himself into every
available activity. With his sister Frances, Hubert sang at intermission
of the Westerns and Hollywood romances showing at the Riley
Opera House. On that same stage, he performed in elementary
school operettas. Still too young to join the high school football
team, he lugged its equipment to the gridiron and then prowled the
sidelines as self-appointed cheerleader, taunting the rival squad as
the home crowed urged him on, “You tell ’em, Pinky.” When an
indignant young fan of one opponent threatened to “knock your
block off,” Hubert tipped his cap and taunted, “You’ll have to catch
me.”68
Starting high school in the late summer of 1925, Hubert became
author of the “HI-SCO-PEP” column in the Times-Record. There he
put into print his first campaign of political advocacy:
Basketball practice is now in full sway and every one is working hard. But we
find as we “get-a-going” how great a difficulty we have to meet in playing in
this gymnasium of ours. As everyone knows, who has ever played in our gym,
or who has watched a game there, our floor space and seating facilities are
absolutely inadequate. Why wait to build a new gymnasium. We must have
one sometime and why not now! . . .
Our school has pep, spirit, and sportsmanship. It is one of Doland’s greatest
achievements. Isn’t it the public’s turn to show its pep, spirit and
sportsmanship by building us a new gym? Does the public want Doland High
School to be laughed at because of its gym? Some of our neighbors refuse to
play us on our home floor. They say our gymnasium is a slam [sic] to the
school and the community. Now let us “come to life” and all boost for a new
gym.69
The surrounding misery, however, was ultimately unignorable. By
1925, total land value in Spink County was down to about $50
million, compared with $90 million just five years earlier; in terms of
net worth, the county’s farms had fallen back to their level in 1910.70
Farm foreclosures in the county increased from 16 in 1921 to 86 in
1924.71 Though bushel prices for wheat somewhat recovered to a
statewide average of $1.35 by 1925,72 that was still far below the
coveted “two-dollar wheat” of the wartime boom. As if sensing that
Doland was a losing venture, the same Chicago & North Western
railroad that had established the town forty years earlier reduced
service from twice daily to once—a mail train one day, a freight the
next. The night watchman at the Doland depot got laid off.73
Yet when the conditions argued for caution, H. H. once again
succumbed to his huckster’s streak, his Peruna streak. It took the
form now of trying to sell classical record albums. H. H. ordered
dozens upon dozens of 78s from RCA’s elite Red Seal label, and then
he set to convincing the subsistence farmers and struggling
townspeople that what they really needed was the uplifting sound of
Fritz Kreisler or Sergei Rachmaninoff or Enrico Caruso. H. H. played
the records on a Victrola in the drugstore for his captive audience;
he loaded the records into his truck and plied the same farm-to-farm
route he used for hog serum.
Invariably, he returned home with stacks of unsold albums.
“Mom, they just didn’t sell,” he would sigh to Christine. She knew
then that her modest hopes for a rug or a davenport were fruitless,
and no amount of shuffling apology from H. H. reduced the sting.
Trying to dispel the familial gloom, Christine would play the piano
and lead her children in sing-alongs. But her sister Olga, a frequent
visitor, could see Christine growing more nervous, more agitated,
more finicky, wilting under the pressure of the household’s unreliable
provider and resenting the unending hours he spent at the drugstore
with his business schemes and political dreams.74
H. H. had some prominent company in his ill-founded optimism.
The two banks in town—the State Bank of Doland and the Security
State Bank—had vastly increased their lending during the giddy
years of the wartime boom, tripling and nearly quintupling their
exposure, respectively.75 All the risk appeared to be cushioned by a
program begun in 1916 by South Dakota’s progressive governor,
Peter Norbeck, which guaranteed that the state would cover
depositors’ losses.76
But when the Great War ended and federal farm supports were
removed, the price of wheat tumbled. And virtually every loan the
Doland banks had made depended directly on the value of wheat or
the land on which it was grown. The State Banking Commission
began flagging the Doland banks as early as 1921 for “excessive
loans” and pressing them to write off the most dubious altogether.
Repeatedly from 1923 through 1925, the State Bank of Doland and
Security State Bank were only “conditionally approved.” As bank
failures accelerated throughout the state—there were twenty-two in
the last three months of 1925 alone from several hundred banks
statewide—South Dakota’s fund to compensate depositors was itself
running low on money.77
H. H. and the other customers of Doland’s banks knew almost
nothing of the grim facts. Doland’s banks took large ads in the
Times-Record showing perfectly balanced books for the year 1925
and boasting of their dividends to depositors. “A Bank of Strength
and Character,” proclaimed the ad for the State Bank of Doland. In a
local news column heralding the new year of 1926, the Times-
Record itself attested that “these institutions are in good financial
condition.”78
Merely four days after that sunny assessment, the state
dispatched an examiner to comb through the books of the State
Bank of Doland. He arrived at a drastically different conclusion, citing
“excessive loans,” “poor and irregular cash items,” and too many
investments in real estate that was “heavy and slow and subject to
prior encumbrances.” Five months later, on June 9, 1926, state
officials declared the bank insolvent and shut it down. In early
August, trying to avoid the same fate, the Security State Bank
suspended its operation in the hope of reorganizing.79
H. H. lost twice over. His entire business account, placed with the
State Bank of Doland, evaporated with its June demise. He hurriedly
deposited his remaining cash into Security State Bank, only to have
that money frozen with the bank’s suspension.80 Even Hubert, by his
adolescent’s standards, got wiped out, losing the $140 he had
conserved over years of peddling newspapers and magazines.81
Tales of instant dispossession swirled through Doland. One
involved an immigrant named Oscar Schultz, who had started out as
a field hand and saved and invested his money until he owned five
farms and was a general partner in the State Bank of Doland.
Because of that position, his property was being seized as part of
paying the bank’s debts. At age sixty-five, Schultz “went back to
assembling farm machinery as a day worker.”82 Then there was the
rumor that George Gross, president of the Security State Bank, had
committed suicide. While that lurid account was untrue, Gross
indeed suffered a breakdown and slunk off to Minneapolis to find
work managing a pool hall.83 It fell to the Doland’s grain elevator
company to cash people’s checks.
In the faces of the townspeople, Hubert saw “despair . . . the look
. . . of uncertainty, of unpredictability,” as he later said in an
interview, “a sense of fear and hopelessness which seemed to grip
them.” At age fifteen, he drew an adult lesson that went beyond
immediate sympathy or shock for Doland’s victims. For the first time,
Hubert perceived the might of systemic forces, forces that swept in
from a distance, like a prairie twister, and smashed the lives in their
path. “One learns that no matter how competent his father may
have been or how good his mother or how fine a community,”
Hubert recalled, “it could be destroyed or it could be wrenched or it
could be injured with forces over which he or his parents had no
control. That this little secure world of his home town just wasn’t
strong enough to fight off or resist the powerful economic and social
forces that seem to be crowding in upon them.”84
⋆⋆⋆
In October 1924, almost exactly midway between the Humphrey
family’s twin crises of losing their home and their bank savings, a
new minister named Albert Hartt arrived in Doland to assume the
pulpit of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Because the church
parsonage stood near Doland’s single school, Reverend Hartt headed
there with his son Julian to register the boy for ninth grade. As the
Hartts crossed the schoolyard, Julian recognized a wiry, freckled kid
wearing a familiar cap. He was the same twerp Julian had
threatened to punch out a year earlier for taunting the high school
football team from Groton when it played Doland.
“We’ve met before,” the antagonist said now, extending his hand.
“I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am. I’m Pinky
Humphrey.”85
So began the closest friendship of Hubert’s youth and with it his
theological education. Hubert had been baptized as a child in the
Norwegian Lutheran church that his mother’s family attended in Lily.
When the Humphrey family had moved to Doland, Christine
assented to sending the children to the Methodist Episcopal Church,
as it was the only Protestant congregation in town. If she left it to H.
H., she recognized, the children would all grow up as heathens.
Hubert dutifully attended Sunday school and heard the conventional
doctrine of temperance, purity, and salvation, the last being a kind of
coupon earned on earth but only redeemed in the heavenly
hereafter.
Then Reverend Hartt came to town, dispatched there as part of
the Methodist program of rotating clergy every few years. Though
the minister had spent sixteen previous years serving four other
churches in South Dakota, he made an unlikely shepherd for a
prairie flock. Hartt was a Yankee, born in Maine to a lineage of
preachers, ordained as an elder by the Boston University School of
Theology. In the parsonage, he kept volumes of Poe, Kipling,
Washington Irving, and Robert Louis Stevenson, along with a
dictionary, encyclopedia, and multiple Bibles. Reverend Hartt took
the concept of citizenship seriously enough that, in his mid-forties
with a wife and three children, he had volunteered as a battlefield
chaplain in the Great War.
No stranger to the interplay of religion and politics, the Methodist
Episcopal Church in America had fractured into northern and
southern factions in 1844 over the issue of slavery. In the Civil War’s
wake, and amid the ostentatious wealth of the Gilded Age, a
politically liberal movement began rising within Methodist and other
mainline Protestant denominations, reaching its peak just before the
Great War. It went by the name of the Social Gospel and its message
was often distilled to the phrase, “We believe in deed, not creed.”
That aphorism referred to a reversal of fundamentalist
Christianity’s emphases on personal piety, social conservatism, and
biblical literalism as prerequisites for one’s heavenly afterlife.
Proponents and followers of the Social Gospel while in many cases
as personally devout and theologically orthodox as their foes,
stressed the doing of good works in this world. They read the Jesus
narrative with more of a focus on his ministry to the oppressed than
his death on the cross and maintained that establishing the Kingdom
of God on earth included such practical efforts as raising wages,
shortening work hours, and banning child labor. So fierce was the
critique of capitalism among some adherents of the Social Gospel
that they argued it was compatible with socialism.
Reverend Hartt did not espouse the Social Gospel, but neither did
he denounce it. His own theology, as delivered from the Methodist
Episcopal pulpit and summertime revival tents, left the door ajar just
enough for progressive influences to slip inside. Decades later, as a
prominent theologian himself, Julian Hartt would describe his father’s
style as “perfectionist piety.”86 To be a faithful Christian, Albert Hartt
contended, was “to show forth kindness, humility, generosity,
patience in affliction, good cheer: these as well as purity of mind and
heart.”87
Reverend Hartt’s church in Doland, appropriately enough, did not
have a cross in its “main room,” as the sanctuary was called. The
unpainted walls instead featured a list of the Ten Commandments.
The minister’s concern was with character—guarding against pride,
pretension, artifice, and boastfulness—and with the importance of
service. His biblical model of such service came from the Sermon on
the Mount: “Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him
twain.”88 In plainer language, Jesus’s admonition urged Reverend
Hartt to do more than what is required, to put out extra effort,
particularly on behalf of another person, and most especially one
who is needy.89 The formulation hardly qualified as radical, and yet it
rebuked the notion shared by frontier pioneer and skyscraper tycoon
alike that all failure is personal in nature and attributable to the
individual shortcomings that Christianity calls sin.
At the same time, Reverend Hartt privately held the conventional
prejudices of the day. Along with the Saturday Evening Post, he
subscribed to the Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford’s newspaper,
with its weekly compendium of anti-Semitic calumnies. He reviled
Irish Catholics as “the scum of the earth,”90 blaming them for
corrupt political machines and the scourge of alcohol alike. Yet,
when a bootlegger outside Doland shot dead a federal agent, it was
Reverend Hartt who gently broke the tragic news to the slain man’s
brother—a Catholic priest in the nearby town of Turton.
Under Reverend Hartt’s aegis, Hubert and Julian joined the
church’s Boy Scout troop, which the minister puckishly named the
Irregulars. On Sunday mornings, they sat together in the back row
of pews, flipping through the hymnal and offering their own bits of
humorous dissidence: “You better yield to temptation, because
yielding is fun.”91 In truth, neither Hubert nor Julian would dare such
a thing. They unflinchingly obeyed Reverend Hartt’s commands not
to swear, not to cheat, not to dance, not to tell or so much as
snicker at a dirty joke. Drunkenness and fornication were beyond the
boys’ imaginings.92
By the standards of a remote town in the Great Plains, Hubert
and Julian were a couple of hothouse flowers, unashamed of their
attraction to the life of the mind. Besides the usual schoolyard
games, they concocted a version of cricket using a broomstick for a
bat. Their idea of fun included drawing out maps of Caesar’s Gallic
Wars. Both boys thrived on the nearly classical curriculum
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
ja vastaus Köökarista saapui jääsuhteiden tähden vasta keväällä.
Kirjeessä vanha Apelblom sanoi arvanneensa asiain kallistuvan
siihen suuntaan, toivotti Jumalan siunausta ja ilmaisi selvään
mielihyvänsä tämän käänteen johdosta. Fransilja ei tulisi katumaan
naimiskauppaansa, Hambergista hän saisi hyvän ja kokeneen
miehen eikä siinä talossa tarvitsisi nälkää nähdä, sen hän ainakin
tiesi. Kirjeeseen, jonka varmaan Johannes-lanko oli piirustanut, oli
äiti liittänyt helliä terveisiä ja toivotuksia, joita lukiessa Fransiljalle
tulivat vedet silmiin.
IV.
Fransiljalta sai hän kuulla että Fanny oli luvannut sen Marille.
Varmaankin oli Mari käynyt hakemassa sen sieltä ylisiltä.
Nyt vasta alkoi Kalle-Kustaan pää olla oikein selvänä. Hän tunsi
korviansa kuumottavan ja jonkun äkillisen tunteen vallassa silmäsi
hän kuin häpeissään taakseen, olisiko siellä joku kuulemassa hänen
ajatuksiaan.
Neljä vuotta sitten, kun hän Bertan ja äidin kanssa oli hinannut
lautan kotiin Skälskäristä, oli sydän hyppinyt hänen rinnassaan. Hän
ei puhunut silloin lähemmin tuumistaan, alkoi vaan vääntää kiviä ja
kaivaa perustuksia mäen päälle ja Bertta ja lapset seurasivat
jännityksellä hänen toimiaan Kohta he saisivat asua oikeassa
korkeassa, valoisassa tuvassa, jossa oli hella ja leivinuuni ja voisi
olla oikein kukkia ikkunalla. Isä myhäili tyytyväisenä siinä
vääntäessään hiki päässä. Hän ei muistanut poiketa Malakias-
suutarin luo, joka asui toisella puolen salmen ja toi aina kaupungista
viinaa.
Silloin hän tunsi että nyt siitä ei enää tulisi mitään… ei koskaan
hän jaksaisi ostaa hirsiä, ei koskaan hän löytäisi uutta tukkilauttaa!
Kaikki tämäniltainen viina nousi vihdoinkin päähän ja hän iski
kirveellään sokeasti, raivoisasti eteensä, katsomatta sattuiko se
alushirteen vai seinään vai kiveen.