Chapter III The Hickories
We drove up to the great mansion built of home-baked bricks. It sat on a blue grass slope, and before it lay twenty acres of blue grass lawn, tree-peopled: oaks, ash, poplars; and elms, red and white; and a great broad-topped gum. Eloise and I remembered this last best of all, for in the fall it early turned into a great, flaming brushheap of red, crimson streaked with black. Scattered about on the lawn, filling the gaps, were single trees of dogwood. In the dusk they shone like silver nosegays in dark vases.
The evening dank was in the air as we drove up; that rare odor, which is really no odor, but only a memory of one; and as we whirled up the drive there came a whisp of perfume, blue grass cut before its time, fresh spring hay, for a sick brood mare, in the meadow beyond.
The night sounds made me homesick, even though I was at home; a whippoorwill, a whinnying mare, the lowing of a lonesome calf in the barn. Far off, in the faint purple twilight, stood the hills; and nearer was the black fringe of trees which moated Stone’s River. Here was home and April, and my heart was eager for them.
This was The Home Stretch, the home of my grandsire, General John Rutherford. His daughter, my Aunt Lucretia, ran the farm for him, as she did everything else within ten miles of her, for my grandsire was old, and had lost a leg while fighting with Stonewall Jackson in the Valley.
Eloise guessed my thoughts. Her voice was quiet and tender as she said, “You should see our hickories, Jack!”
I jumped from the surrey at the door, and drew her with me. “Let us look at them first of all,” I said, “because there was our playhouse, there were our dreams.”
She smiled as she pointed to the walks still lined with sunken ale bottles, their mouths projecting upward as borders for our flower beds.
Aunt Lucretia had gone into the house. Thomas had wheeled the surrey and team to the barn.
The land we stood on had once belonged to Andrew Jackson. Here he had lived before he had moved to the farm four miles away known as the Hermitage. Clover Bottom had been the pride of a great, strong heart. In the field beyond had stood the pioneer store where Jackson and Coffee had traded, with Indians. Beyond that was the far-famed circular field, in the great bend of Stone’s River, and level as a floor, where Truxton and Plowboy and the unbeaten Maria had once raced. Still farther beyond Stone’s River circled like a tube of quicksilver through the green of the wooded hills.
Never before was honesty put to such a test as when Andrew Jackson gave up this home to pay an unjust debt. Without complaint he moved further into the wilderness, and built his great double log-cabin home. That cabin is now a shrine!
Here stood the giant hickories in a group, the rugged, stately trees. Why did he plant them here? Or had the old hero, with that love of his for the unbending tree for which he was named, let them stand unscathed, as Nature had placed them? They stood in a great group, cathedral-like, one taller and more stately than his fellows, like a spire.
Of all the trees the hickory is the conqueror. Its purpose in life is to withstand. It is a fighting tree, rough of dress, careless of manner, rude in its unpolished bark. To be frightened by the hails of heaven is not for it. The hurricane cannot quell it. From its youth it has fought the storm, and when the storm has tired it has still stood, tattered but glorious.
Every fall in one great flaming pyre as of a burning bush wherein there is Divinity, they have blazed and burned before our wondering eyes. A warrior tree, and yet, withal, what no warrior ever was: a giver of gifts, not a wrecker of those already garnered; not bullets, not shells, not grape shot dropped on the land; but nuts. Some day, truly, the real conqueror of the world will conquer like this tree—overcoming in a hail of kindness flung from loving hands.
“It was these trees,” I said, turning to Eloise, “that sent me to Germany to study forestry; these trees and Dr. Gottlieb. How is he? I can hardly wait till morning to run over to his cabin.”
Eloise laughed. “Oh! you were always a poet, Jack. Dr. Gottlieb is the same, and he is famous now; such books he has written of flowers and trees!”
“Do you know they use his text-books in Germany?” I asked proudly; “and that last work of his, ‘Tree Influence on Precipitation,’ was talked about in all the universities. Look,” I said, pointing to a scarred and gullied hillside across the road, showing bare even in the twilight, “there is the great work to be done in our land, there is the coming field for the young brains of our country—that, and better farming, and the watering of our great barren spots in the West. We’ve cut down our trees wantonly—our pioneer sires did so before us,—for the land had to be cleared or they would have died. But now if I can only get them to change! You should see the German and French system. When I came through France, along their coasts, both on the Mediterranean and the Channel, were great forests planted to break the winds and storms. I was told that a century ago the winds began to make deserts of their coasts, encroaching mile after mile into the land. Now, with the trees planted, it is a garden again.”
Eloise was listening silently. Then she said, “Jack, that is all very fine, and it took courage in you to do it, to go over there. It was not Aunt Lucretia’s idea; hers was a horse-farm for you; and the General’s was West Point and war. He has never been the same toward you, Jack—I can see it—since you would not go to West Point.”
“He never cared for me as he did for Braxton,” I said. I winced, for I loved my old grandsire.
“He has not written me a line since I have been gone,” I went on.
“Poor Jack,” and she took my hand in hers in the old way, “and I have always teased you cruelly, Jack.”
“And Eloise,” I said, “I have always loved you.”
“Jack,” she said, “Little Brother,”—those words I knew of old meant condescension—“I knew it would not do. I wanted you to love someone else. You know Aunt Lucretia’s silly conditions.” She flushed in the twilight. “I hoped while you were away,” she went on, “if we didn’t write you’d forget me.”
“And instead,” I said, bringing her hand to my lips, “I thought of no one else but you. I came back loving you, Eloise, more than ever; as a man’s love is greater than a boy’s.”
She grew suddenly stern. “Jack, Jack, haven’t I told you not to?”
“Not?” I cried. “Did any real lover ever have a choice? It’s not his part to decide—”
“Listen, Jack; you know I would not lie to you, but you must understand how foolish—how useless—”
“Come to supper, Jack—Eloise.” It was Aunt Lucretia calling. “Here is father and Colonel Goff,” she added as we walked up the steps. “Father has grown quite deaf, Jack, since you saw him.”
Colonel Goff, handsome, alert, and quick even to bluntness, came forward, and shook my hand.
“Glad to see you back again, Jack—welcome home.”
My grandfather sat in his great chair, facing the lawn. His wooden leg rested on the railing. Great curls of tobacco smoke rose from his corner of the porch.
There was the old nervous, staccato clatter of wood and cane meeting on the floor as he arose to greet me. I saw the stern, unyielding face give back no smile of pleasure as he took my hand. He stood looking at me doubtfully, his mind evidently weakening with old age. The sadness of it flashed over me, for his mind had been the mind of a strong man in his day. My Aunt Lucretia promptly screamed in his ear, “This is Jack, Father; he has come home.”
“Jack, ah—ah—Jack, glad to see you, suh; and who did you say it was, Lucretia?”
“Your grandson, Jack Ballington. He has been away studying in Germany,” she screamed again.
“Aha,” said the old man, “aha—of course—wouldn’t go to West Point, though the President himself gave him the appointment in my behalf. Aha—Jack—a brooding, dreaming sort of a feller—always mooning around trees and writing poetry. Won’t fight—not a damn one of ’em will. And what a chance to fight you would have now! What a bully scrap we are going to have! Have you heard, suh,” he turned, and spoke sharply to me, “have you heard that the Spaniards blew up our battleship the other month, and that we are going to blow hell out of ’em? And they’ve been needing it for two centuries. Ah! If I were only younger, wouldn’t I be in! Imagine it, Goff,” he said, turning to him, “imagine me fighting under the old flag again! Didn’t think I’d ever live to see that day when we were charging Banks in the Valley. Ah, ’twas a family scrap—only a family fight—like old man Tully and wife—have to fight a little at home now and then, so they’d love each other more when they made up. Ah, suh, I’d give this farm to be your age again, and a chance to fight under the old flag once more. Joe Wheeler wrote me the other day that President McKinley would make me a Brigadier, if I’d go in. By gad, suh, I sat down, and shed tears to think I was too old!”
He was silent awhile; then, “Ha, ha, but I read in the paper to-day that the Spanish Prime Minister is out in a statement saying it’ll be easy to whip us, because we’re divided North and South, and that the Southern Confederacy will arise again! He is right. We have already arisen. I see in every Southern State ten times more have volunteered than their quota calls for. Yes, we’ll arise, and will help McKinley whip hell out of them!” He stamped his wooden leg on the floor.
“Now, Braxton Bragg—ah, he’s in it. Do you know, suh, that he’s a Captain in the First Tennessee, and they are preparing now to go to the Philippines? Ah, what a chance, what a chance you had, suh! And what do you say you did in Germany?”
“I studied forestry and farming, sir,” I said, flushing hot under his words, “and with it I took two years’ training in the military school at Berlin, taking instructions up to the rank of captain in the Emperor’s Guards.”
“The hell you did!” he shouted excitedly. “Did you have sense enough to do that? Those soldiers are the best drilled soldiers in the world, Goff. Your damned English to the contrary notwithstanding,” he added, smiling at the Colonel. “In the Emperor’s Guards! Strike a match, Lucretia, and let me see him.” In the light of the match he stood up I stood above him six good inches. That and my shoulders breadth surprised him, for he went on: “You left here a crippled stripling, mooning all the time over flowers and such cat-hair, and crying if anybody cut down a tree. But you’ll never fight, none of you ever have! Sissy is the word for the whole kit of the world’s mooners. Still, you do surprise me, suh, now and then; I’ll be honest about it; like this studying military in Germany. Ha—ha—think of it!”
“And beating you and your whole bragging bunch with Little Sister—have you forgotten that, sir?” asked Eloise, nervily thrusting her intense face into his, her eyes flashing, ready as she always had been to fight my battles for me.
My grandsire laughed good-naturedly. He had always had respect for Eloise in her fighting moods, as had everybody else on the farm. His voice was decidedly conciliatory as he said, “There, dear,—maybe I am too hard on Jack—ha—ha—guess that was neatly turned, and we took our medicine like men and soldiers. Eh, Goff?” He turned to me suddenly. “If you’d only quit this tree foolishness and fight; but you won’t do it, suh—not a damned one of you ever did! And your lameness?”
“It was a cartilage in my knee, sir; Dr. Hoffman, the famous surgeon, took it out soon after I went over. I am not lame now, sir, at all.”
“Glad to hear it, suh, glad to hear it.”
He was silent for a moment, looking out into the dusk. “And you know all about trees—aha—well, there’s only one tree in the world I care a damn for; there it is, and it is dying. My mother loved it. She used to nurse me there,” he added tenderly, his voice dropping low.
“It’s that beautiful elm at the dining-room window, Jack,” explained my Aunt.
“The most perfect tree I ever saw,” went on my grandsire, reminiscently. “The others just grew up any way, but that one stood like the great feathered eagle plume in the hair of the Comanche chief, Setting Sun. He was the first Indian I killed on the plains—in a hand to hand fight—and that eagle feather in his hair—I’ll never forget it. And that elm was like it—and—and my mother loved it,” he said, his voice muffled up in huskiness. He blew his nose vigorously, and went on more cheerily, “Make yourself at home, suh—do what you please. I wanted you to be a soldier, suh, like Braxton Bragg, ah, what a man that boy has developed into at West Point! But it isn’t born in you—can’t make a fighter out of a dreamer.”
He sat down, and Aunt Lucretia, taking my hand, led me in. “Goff,” I heard him say, “that fight at Winchester when we charged into the town—you led me a little you know, and—”
I felt Eloise’s hand in mine as we went down the hall. “I hate him,” she said, tossing her head back toward the old man. “It’s mean and sinful; but I hate him! After all these years to greet you in that way. And Braxton Bragg—you should see what a fool he is, Jack, in his captain’s straps, and living hourly up to his name!”