Excerpt:
(Chapter 10): The Great Depression
What I often heard from family and friends who knew my Grandfather Appenheimer was that “he got a lot of men through the Depression”— not by charity but by reliable paid labor. By “a lot of men” I mean perhaps a couple dozen, and by “paid labor” I mean hard, sweaty work in the fields from sun-up to sun-down during the hottest, muggiest days in August—the worst season of the year to be out in the fields under the sun. It may not seem like much, money-wise, by our standards, but for most of the men employed at his sorghum mill for a few weeks every August, it was the only cash they might earn all year, and it was enough to make a critical difference.
More about my grandfather’s sorghum operation in the next chapter. But what I’d like to consider here are one or two aspects of the Great Depression as they were experienced on the Appenheimer farm, and as they subsequently appeared in a few of my Stark County poems.
One story told to me by my Uncle Clay (my grandfather’s only son), and repeated several times over the years, hardly qualifies as a story at all. It is more along the lines of what I would call a “particular.” Which is to say, an interesting fact without much story-line. It has to do with a general truth about the Great Depression in America, namely, that thousands of desperate, destitute men hit the road or the rails throughout the 1930s, seeking work— any work at all— and, when they had to, begging for food. These days, knocking on somebody’s kitchen door in dirty, thread-bare clothes will likely as not get you shot, but back then America was a very different country, worse in some ways, perhaps, but often remarkably generous.
The “particular” told to me by my uncle was that every year— and always at the very same time of year— a man would come through and ask to spend a night or two in my grandfather’s barn, and my grandfather always allowed it. Where he was coming from and where he was going, my uncle didn’t remember, and perhaps the man never said, and perhaps my grandfather, with the reserve common among men who are only somewhat acquainted, never asked. But for several years this man’s appearance was a regular seasonal occurrence. Certainly he would have been fed. My grandmother would have brought a sandwich or two to the barn, and perhaps packed him a little something for the road. Had he needed a few dollars my grandfather would have found some work around the place that needed doing. And that’s about it for that story.
There wasn’t enough there to make a poem, had I wished to stick to the facts. I could have embellished it, certainly, but that would have ruined it. So I left it alone. What I did write dealt with the same general situation about wandering “tramps,” as they were called, and was based on several newspaper articles from the early 1930s in the Stark County News, which provided all the necessary facts. The poem is told in the voice of one of those wandering tramps and, as I had spent quite a lot of time hitch-hiking around the country in my younger years with little or no money, it was easy to put myself in my narrator’s shoes.
Hotel Calaboose
Toulon, Illinois, late October, 1932
I would go through Toulon two or three times
a year, and generally book well ahead
for a night at the Hotel Calaboose.
As free lodgings went, it wasn’t so bad—
always warm and dry and cleaner than most,
a naked steel slab attached to the bars
for a bed. You had to furnish your own
newspapers for a mattress and roll
your coat for a pillow. (I’d started out
with a red woolen blanket two years before,
but it was soon stolen). When you arrived,
you were handed a saw and shown around back
to a big woodpile to do some work.
There was a stove inside that you could use
to warm up your beans, if you had a can.
The worst part is that they bolted and locked
the door every night at seven, which did
somewhat inhibit a night on the town,
but we “knights of the road” were accustomed to
the ascetic life. As it was explained,
they locked us up for our own protection,
but what they meant was for their protection.
They let us out in the morning at seven.
As I took a moment to kneel in the grass
and check through my stuff for a final time,
the sheriff stepped out on the porch and asked
which way I was headed. I shrugged, and said
I might catch a ride to the switchyard over
at Galesburg and hop the first open car
that I came to, rolling anywhere west.
He nodded, and thoughtfully gazed down the road.
He said this past October had been
the busiest yet at the calaboose,
with two or three transients every night,
sometimes as many as half a dozen,
except for three nights the previous week
with none at all, as it was so warm
that whoever was passing through most likely
availed himself of a haystack or barn.
More than seventy men so far this month,
he said, from every part of the country,
and even some foreign accents as well—
and every one of them down on his luck.
There was nothing much to say after that.
He took a half-empty pack of Luckys
from out of his pocket and shook one loose.
I nodded my thanks and tucked it unlit
beneath my hat to enjoy after lunch,
and started off down the road. Take care,
I heard him say. A raw cutting wind
picked up as I got to the edge of town.
I lifted my collar and lowered my hat
and huddled against the cold as I walked.
After a while I heard an old pickup
clashing its gears with a clatter as it
came up behind me. I stepped off the road
and stuck out my thumb. The truck rattled past
and rolled to a stop. Through the rear window
I could see the driver reaching across
the narrow cab, and the door swung out.
My Aunt Betty, the Appenheimer’s second eldest daughter, kept a diary during the early 1930s, when she was 13 through 15 years of age, and on November 25th, 1934, her entry reads:
"About 5 a tramp came and asked for something to eat. We didn’t have much but gave him all he wanted. He sure was hungry."
Perhaps my grandfather recalled returning to Illinois by covered wagon as a very small child, after going bust in Kansas, and begging a few ears of field corn from a farm along the way to boil for supper, and my grandmother could have recalled numerous times as a child when there was not enough food to go around.
There are two other Stark County poems situated in the Great Depression, about transient men searching for work. Both are fiction, though the first contains autobiographical elements, and the second parallels an event in my grandfather’s life. Both he and I, as young men in our early 20s, spent a year wandering alone through the West with almost no money, working our way as we went. Alpheus stopped off to work on farms and ranches, and I worked in cedar mills and on logging crews in the Pacific Northwest.
As I say, both poems are fiction and are intended to portray situations common during the Depression. But both are also informed by the personal histories of myself and my grandfather. Anyone who knew me when I was in my teens will recognize many basic similarities to the naïve teenager in “Travelin’ Man.” And the situation described in “The Itinerant” may bear some resemblance to an interlude in my grandfather’s wanderings through Mexico in 1912 when he signed on as a hand at a large ranch and became romantically involved with the owner’s daughter, to the point where he was seriously considering marriage, but finally opted to move on.
Travelin’ Man
After he turned seventeen, they stopped
talking of how much promise he showed,
and by the time he had reached twenty-two
it was painfully clear to everyone
that he’d never amount to much at all.
In another era he might have galloped
off to war, which is what a young man
did in his father’s and grandfather’s time
when prospects were poor, but he was born
too late for that. What he had instead
was something they called the damned Depression,
which, if nothing else, provided him with
the perfect excuse to get out of town.
After half a dozen half-hearted stabs
at finding work, he rolled up a change
of clothes in a blanket, waved to the folks
and hitched a ride to the switchyard over
at Galesburg, where he hopped a midnight
freight to Topeka and all points west.
With nothing on hand and nothing in store,
he could travel light, which suited him fine.
He thought of himself as a travelin’ man,
and he liked to keep his options open.
He rolled through the night on a boxcar roof
underneath the stars, facing westward to see
just where he was headed, then switched around
at dawn to look back at the rising sun.
It was so resplendent, spilling its crimson
across the fields, that he almost forgot
how cold and hungry he was. He turned
back around again, preferring to feel
the wind in his face and wanting to see
what was up ahead. The day was full
of promise, by God, and something good
was coming his way, he knew for a fact.
He fixed his eye on the distance, intending
to shout aloud the moment it appeared.
(originally published in the Naugatuck River Review)
The Itinerant
He had stayed on a week, this taciturn man,
this man who, despite having taken meals
each day at her table, had never once
found reason to speak of his purpose or past—
never, that is, until the last evening
when, as she was reaching to pass a bowl
of boiled potatoes, he told her that he
would leave with the morning.
And, later, as they
stood framed in the doorway, their talking done
and he on his way to the barn, she told him,
"Wait here a little," and disappeared back
through the parlor, returning almost at once
to place a few bills in his hand. She wished
to ask him where he would go, to ask him
where he was going the morning he passed
the farm and had stopped to inquire for work,
but she felt a reluctance to ask what he
had not volunteered himself, and she said,
"I am grateful to you for all you have done."
He nodded and thought once again of how
he had seen her that day alone in the field,
doggedly heaving bales on a wagon,
and he asked of her, "How long can it be,
with your husband dead and two hundred acres
of corn coming on— how long can you last,
a woman alone on so large a farm?"
"For as long as Heaven intends," she replied,
and he nodded once more and, squarely placing
his hat on his head, made ready to leave.
"Must you go just yet?" she asked him softly,
"I have put on a pot of coffee." He turned
and seemed for a moment to study her,
then once again took his hat in his hand.
"You can sit on the swing," she motioned, stepping
back through the door. "I won't be a minute,"
but when she returned with two steaming cups,
she found him sitting instead on the rail
with his back to the post. She smiled and said,
"Do you dislike comfort, Mr McCann?"
He seemed to be gazing at something out
in the dark of the night. "I am fine," he said.
She held out a brimming cup. "It is strong
and scalding," she warned, "and probably bitter."
He took it with what she thought was a smile,
the merest trace of a smile, and eased
a savoring sip. She moved to the swing
and sat on it lightly, holding her cup,
and he saw how the simple hem of her skirt
swirled once at her ankles and then was still.
From somewhere out of the darkness there came,
from a distant pasture, the melancholy
lowing of a bull— and she knew, however
long before daylight she might walk out
to offer him coffee or food for the road,
she would find him gone and, struck by the thought,
she asked of him quickly, "Where will you go?"
"West, I suppose," was all that he said.
"Have you no family?" There, it was out.
"None that would have me around," he replied,
and she knew by the way that he turned to look
at nothing at all, at the empty night,
she had asked too much, and she feared that he
would rise to his feet and bid her good night,
but he kept his place and, to her surprise,
looked back at her gently. And what she said next,
what she found herself saying, was nothing that she
had so much as thought: "I would like you to stay,"
and she almost gasped to hear herself say it.
She thought that she heard him sigh as he said,
"It wouldn't work out." "I could pay you more,"
she countered at once, with a sinking sense,
but he shook his head firmly. "It's not the pay."
"Well, what is it then?" and she heard in her voice
a tremor of pleading and hated the sound.
"I am sorry," she said. "I have no right to ask."
He sought for some word to reassure her,
this woman with whom he had felt more at peace
than with any woman that he had known,
but the distance between what he felt somewhere
in the depth of himself and the words he would need
to tell of it here in this woman's presence,
was a distance that he could not hope to bridge,
and so he said nothing. Beneath the porch,
a cricket began to chirr and they both
gave all their attention to it, keeping
their thoughts at bay.
It wasn't that she,
now that the haying was done, couldn't find
and hire some capable hand— it wasn't
a matter of labor or need— it was more,
more than she knew how to say, and more
than the circumstance that had led him here
and just as surely would lead him away,
would ever permit.
With his coffee gone,
he started to rise, so she left the swing
and stepped up before him, taking the empty
cup from his hand. He put on his hat
and regarded her for a long moment.
"I'll leave at daybreak." She nodded, but found
there was nothing to say. "I have liked it here,"
he said, and started to say something more,
but then merely tipped the brim of his hat
and turned away toward the barn.
The next morning,
expecting to find him gone, she only
entered the barn to see if, by chance,
he had left anything behind. As she swung
the great door aside she was wholly engulfed
in the redolence of the few hundred bales
they had stacked together. She stood for a time
in the twilit bay till the wagon and bales
and dust-laden rafters resolved from the dusk.
She could tell by the broken twine and scattered
timothy stalks where it was he had slept
and, standing there lost in his absence, she felt
more tired than she had felt since the day
her husband was buried— and for the first time
in her thirty-eight years she was overcome
with the sense that more of her life had passed
than remained to her.
She emerged from the barn
to the sight of treeless fields stretching out
to a level horizon far to the west
where, just for a moment, a thought carried her,
and she stood there poised on the moment, as though
in expectation of something— and then,
entrusting the thought to that hidden place
she had long ago made for herself, she turned
once more to the work that awaited her.
(originally published in the Amish
periodical, Farming Magazine)
No comments:
Post a Comment