Vandemark's Folly Part 1

Vandemark's Folly.

by Herbert Quick.

INTRODUCTION

The work of writing the history of this towns.h.i.+p--I mean Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p, Monterey County, State of Iowa--has been turned over to me. I have been asked to do this I guess because I was the first settler in the towns.h.i.+p; it was named after me; I live on my own farm--the oldest farm operated by the original settler in this part of the country; I know the history of these thirty-six square miles of land and also of the wonderful swarming of peoples which made the prairies over; and the agent of the Excelsior County History Company of Chicago, having heard of me as an authority on local history, has asked me to write this part of their new History of Monterey County for which they are now canva.s.sing for subscribers. I can never write this as it ought to be written, and for an old farmer with no learning to try to do it may seem impudent, but some time a great genius may come up who will put on paper the strange and splendid story of Iowa, of Monterey County, and of Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p; and when he does write this, the greatest history ever written, he may find such adventures as mine of some use to him.

Those who lived this history are already few in number, are fast pa.s.sing away and will soon be gone. I lived it, and so did my neighbors and old companions and friends. So here I begin.

The above was my first introduction to this history; and just here, after I had written a nice fat pile of ma.n.u.script, this work came mighty close to coming to an end.

I suppose every person is more or less of a fool, but at my age any man ought to be able to keep himself from being gulled by the traveling swindlers who go traipsing about the country selling lightning rods, books, and trying by every means in their power to get the name of honest and propertied men on the dotted line. Just now I began tearing up the opening pages of my History of Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p, and should have thrown them in the base-burner if it had not been for my granddaughter, Gertrude.

The agent of the Excelsior County History Company called and asked me how I was getting along with the history, and when I showed him what I have written, he changed the subject and began urging me to subscribe for a lot of copies when it is printed, and especially, to make a contract for having my picture in it. He tried to charge me two hundred seventy-five dollars for a steel engraving, and said I could keep the plate and have others made from it. Then I saw through him. He never wanted my history of the towns.h.i.+p. He just wanted to swindle me into buying a lot of copies to give away, and he wanted most to bamboozle me into having a picture made, not half so good as I can get for a few dollars a dozen at any good photographer's, and pay him the price of a good team of horses for it. He thought he could gull old Jake Vandemark!

If I would pay for it, I could get printed in the book a few of my remarks on the history of the towns.h.i.+p, and my two-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar picture. Others would write about something else, and get their pictures in. In that way this smooth scoundrel would make thousands of dollars out of people's vanity--and he expected me to be one of them! If I can put him in jail I'll do it--or I would if it were not for posting myself as a fool.

"Look here," I said, after he had told me what a splendid thing it would be to have my picture in the book so future generations could see what a big man I was. "Do you want what I know about the history of Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p in your book, or are you just out after my money?"

"Well," he said, "if, after you've written twenty or thirty pages, and haven't got any nearer Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p than a ca.n.a.l-boat, somewhere east of Syracuse, New York, in 1850, I'll need some money if I print the whole story--judging of its length by that. Of course, the publication of the book must be financed."

"There's the door!" I said, and pointed to it.

He went out like a shot, and Gertrude, who was on the front porch, came flying in to see what he was running from. I was just opening the stove door. In fact I had put some sc.r.a.ps of paper in; but there was no fire.

"Why, grandpa," she cried, "what's the matter? What's this ma.n.u.script you're destroying? Tell me about it!"

"Give it to me!" I shouted; but she sat down with it and began reading.

I rushed out, and was gone an hour. When I came back, she had pasted the pages together, and was still reading them. She came to me and put her arms about my neck and kissed me; and finally coaxed me into telling her all about the disgraceful affair.

Well, the result of it all was that she has convinced me of the fact that I had better go on with the history. She says that these county-history promoters are all slippery people, but that if I can finish the history as I have begun, it may be well worth while.

"There are publishers," she said, "who do actually print such things.

Maybe a real publisher will want this. I know a publisher who may be glad to get it. And, anyhow, it is a shame for all your experiences to be lost to the world. It's very interesting as far as you've got. Go on with it; and if no publisher wants to print it now, we'll give the ma.n.u.script to the Public Library in Monterey Centre, and maybe, long after both of us are dead and gone, some historian will find it and have it printed. Some time it will be found precious. Write it, grandpa, for my sake! We can make a wonderful story of it."

"We?" I said.

"You, I mean, of course," she replied; "but, if you really want me to do it, I will type it for you, and maybe do a little editing. Maybe you'll let me do a little footnote once in a while, so my name will go into it with yours. I'd be awfully proud, grandpa."

"It'll take a lot of time," I said.

"And you can spare the time as well as not," she answered.

"You all think because I don't go into the field with a team any more,"

I objected, "that I don't amount to anything on the farm; but I tell you that what I do in the way of ch.o.r.es and planning, practically amounts to a man's work."

"Of course it does," she admitted, though between you and me it wasn't so. "But any man can do the ch.o.r.es, and the planning you can do still--and n.o.body can write the History of Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p but Jacobus Teunis Vandemark. You owe it to the West, and to the world."

So, here I begin the second time. I have been bothered up to now by feeling that I have not been making much progress; but now there will be no need for me to skip anything. I begin, just as that canva.s.sing rascal said, a long way from Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p, and many years ago in point of time; but I am afloat with my prow toward the setting sun on that wonderful ribbon of water which led to the West. I was caught in the current. n.o.body could live along the Erie Ca.n.a.l in those days without feeling the suck of the forests, and catching a breath now and then of the prairie winds. So all this really belongs in the history.

J.T. VANDEMARK.

VANDEMARK'S FOLLY

CHAPTER I

A FLAT DUTCH TURNIP BEGINS ITS CAREER

My name is Jacobus Teunis Vandemark. I usually sign J.T. Vandemark; and up to a few years ago I thought as much as could be that my first name was Jacob; but my granddaughter Gertrude, who is strong on family histories, looked up my baptismal record in an old Dutch Reformed church in Ulster County, New York, came home and began teasing me to change to Jacobus. At first I would not give up to what I thought just her silly taste for a name she thought more stylish than plain old Jacob; but she sent back to New York and got a certified copy of the record. So I had to knuckle under. Jacobus is in law my name just as much as Teunis, and both of them, I understand, used to be pretty common names among the Vandemarks, Brosses, Kuyckendalls, Westfalls and other Dutch families for generations. It makes very little difference after all, for most of the neighbors call me Old Jake Vandemark, and some of the very oldest settlers still call me Cow Vandemark, because I came into the county driving three or four yoke of cows--which make just as good draught cattle as oxen, being smarter but not so powerful. This nickname is gall and wormwood to Gertrude, but I can't quite hold with her whims on the subject of names. She spells the old surname van der Marck--a little _v_ and a little _d_ with an _r_ run in, the first two syllables written like separate words, and then the big _M_ for Mark with a _c_ before the _k_. But she will know better when she gets older and has more judgment.

Just now she is all worked up over the family history on which she began laboring when she went east to Va.s.sar and joined the Daughters of the American Revolution. She has tried to coax me to adopt "van der Marck"

as my signature, but it would not jibe with the name of the towns.h.i.+p if I did; and anyhow it would seem like straining a little after style to change a name that has been a household word hereabouts since there were any households. The neighbors would never understand it, anyhow; and would think I felt above them. Nothing loses a man his standing among us farmers like putting on style.

I was born of Dutch parents in Ulster County, New York, on July 27, 1838. It is the only anniversary I can keep track of, and the only reason why I remember it is because on that day, except when it came on a Sunday, I have sown my turnips ever since 1855. Everybody knows the old rhyme:

"On the twenty-seventh of July Sow your turnips, wet or dry."

And wet or dry, my parents in Ulster County, long, long ago, sowed their little red turnip on that date.

I often wonder what sort of dwelling it was, and whether the July heat was not pretty hard on my poor mother. I think of this every birthday.

I guess a habit of mind has grown up which I shall never break off; the moment I begin sowing turnips I think of my mother bringing forth her only child in the heat of dog-days, and of the sweat of suffering on her forehead as she listened to my first cry. She is more familiar to me, and really dearer in this imaginary scene than in almost any real memory I have of her.

I do not remember Ulster County at all. My first memory of my mother is of a time when we lived in a little town the name and location of which I forget; but it was by a great river which must have been the Hudson I guess. She had made me a little cap with a visor and I was very proud of it and of myself. I picked up a lump of earth in the road and threw it over a stone fence, covered with vines that were red with autumn leaves--woodbine or poison-ivy I suppose. I felt very big, and ran on ahead of my mother until she called to me to stop for fear of my falling into the water. We had come down to the big river. I could hardly see the other side of it. The whole scene now grows misty and dim; but I remember a boat coming to the sh.o.r.e, and out of it stepped John Rucker.

Whether he was then kind or cross to me or to my mother I can not remember. Probably my mind was too young to notice any difference less than that between love and cruelty. I know I was happy; and it seems to me that the chief reason of my joy was the new cap and the fact that my heart swelled and I was proud of myself. I do not believe that I was more than three years old. All this may be partly a dream; but I think not.

John Rucker was no dream. He was my mother's second husband; and by the time I was five years old, and had begun to go to one little school after another as we moved about, John Rucker had become the dark cloud in my life. He paid little attention to me, but I recollect that by the time we had settled ourselves at Tempe I was afraid of him. Two or three times he whipped me, but no more severely than was the custom among parents. Other little boys were whipped just as hard, and still were not afraid of their fathers. I think now that I was afraid of him because my mother was. I can not tell how he looked then, except that he was a tall stooped man with a yellowish beard all over his face and talked in a sort of whine to others, and in a sharp domineering way to my mother. To me he scarcely ever spoke at all. At Tempe he had some sort of a shop in which he put up a dark-colored liquid--a patent medicine--which he sold by traveling about the country. I remember that he used to complain of lack of money and of the expense of keeping me; and that my mother made clothes for people in the village.

Tempe was a little village near the Erie Ca.n.a.l somewhere between Rome and Syracuse. There was a dam and water-power in Tempe or near there, which, I think, was the overflow from a reservoir built as a water-supply for the Erie Ca.n.a.l--but I am not sure. I can not find Tempe on the map; but many names have been changed since those days. I think it was farther west than Canastota, but I am not sure--it was a long time ago.

2

Once, for some reason of his own, and when he had got some money in an unexpected way, Rucker took my mother and me to Oneida for an outing.

My mother and I camped by the roadside while Rucker went somewhere to a place where a lot of strangers were starting a colony of Free Lovers.

After he returned he told my mother that we had been invited to join the colony, and argued that it would be a good thing for us all; but my mother got very mad at him, and started to walk home leading me by the hand. She sobbed and cried as we walked along, especially after it grew late in the afternoon and Rucker had not overtaken us with the horse and democrat wagon. She seemed insulted, and broken-hearted; and was angry for the only time I remember. When we at last heard the wagon clattering along behind us in the woods, we sat down on a big rock by the side of the road, and Rucker meanly pretended not to see us until he had driven on almost out of sight. My mother would not let me call out to him; and I stood shaking my fist at the wagon as it went on past us, and feeling for the first time that I should like to kill John Rucker. Finally he stopped and made us follow on until we overtook him, my mother crying and Rucker sneering at both of us. This must have been when I was nine or ten years old. The books say that the Oneida Community was established there in 1847, when I was nine.

Long before this I had been put out by John Rucker to work in a factory in Tempe. It was a cotton mill run, I think, by the water-power I have mentioned. We lived in a log house on a side-hill across the road and above the cotton mill. We had no laws in those days against child labor or long hours. In the winter I worked by candle-light for two hours before breakfast. We went to work at five--I did this when I was six years old--and worked until seven, when we had half an hour for breakfast. As I lived farther from the mill than most of the children who were enslaved there, my breakfast-time was very short. At half past seven we began again and worked until noon, when we had an hour for dinner. At one o'clock we took up work once more and quit at half past five for supper. At six we began our last trick and worked until eight--thirteen hours of actual labor.

I began this so young and did so much of it that I feel sure my growth was stunted by it--I never grew above five feet seven, though my mother was a good-sized woman, and she told me that my father was six feet tall--and my children are all tall. Maybe I should never have been tall anyhow, as the Dutch are usually broad rather than long. Of course this life was hard. I was very little when I began watching machines and tending spindles, and used to cry sometimes because I was so tired. I almost forgot what it was to play; and when I got home at night I staggered with sleepiness.

My mother used to undress me and put me to bed, when she was not pressed with her own work; and even then she used to come and kiss me and see that I had not kicked the quilt off before she lay down for her short sleep. I remember once or twice waking up and feeling her tears on my face, while she whispered "My poor baby!" or other loving and motherly words over me. When John Rucker went off on his peddling trips she would take me out of the factory for a few days and send me to school. The teachers understood the case, and did all they could to help me in spite of my irregular attendance; so that I learned to read after a fas.h.i.+on, and as for arithmetic, I seemed to understand that naturally. I was a poor writer, though; and until I was grown I never could actually write much more than my name. I could always make a stagger at a letter when I had to by printing with a pen or pencil, and when I did not see my mother all day on account of her work and mine, I used to print out a letter sometimes and leave it in a hollow apple-tree which stood before the house. We called this our post-office. I am not complaining, though, of my lack of education. I have had a right good chance in life, and have no reason to complain--except that I wish I could have had a little more time to play and to be with my mother. It was she, though, that had the hard time.

By this time I had begun to understand why John Rucker was always so cross and cruel to my mother. He was disappointed because he had supposed when he married her that she had property. My father had died while a lawsuit for the purpose of settling his father's estate was pending, and Rucker had thought, and so had my mother, that this lawsuit would soon be ended, and that she would have the property, his share of which had been left to her by my father's will. I have never known why the law stood in my mother's way, or why it was at last that Rucker gave up all hope and vented his spite on my mother and on me. I do not blame him for feeling put out, for property is property after all, but to abuse me and my mother shows what a bad man he was. Sometimes he used to call me a d.a.m.ned little beggar. The first time he did that my mother looked at him with a kind of lost look as if all the happiness in life were gone. After that, even when a letter came from the lawyers who were looking after the case, holding out hope, and always asking for money, and Rucker for a day or so was quite chipper and affectionate to my mother in a sickening sort of sneaking way, her spirits never rose so far as I could see. I suppose she was what might be called a broken-hearted woman.

This went on until I was thirteen years old. I was little and not very strong, and had a cough, caused, perhaps, by the hard steady work, and the lint in the air of the factory. There were a good many cases every year of the working people there going into declines and dying of consumption; so my mother had taken me out of the factory every time Rucker went away, and tried to make me play. It was so in all the factories in those days, I guess. I did not feel like playing, and had no playmates; but I used to go down by the ca.n.a.l and watch the boats go back and forth. Sometimes the captains of the boats would ask me if I didn't want a job driving; but I scarcely knew what they meant. I must have been a very backward child, and I surely was a scared and conquered one. I used to sit on a stump by the tow-path, and so close to it that the boys driving the mules or horses drawing the boats could almost strike me with their whips, which they often tried to do as they went by. Then I would scuttle back into the brush and hide. There was a lock just below, but I seldom went to it because all the drivers were egged on to fight each other during the delay at the locks, and the ca.n.a.llers would have been sure to set them on me for the fun of seeing a fight.

On the most eventful evening of my life, perhaps. I sat on this stump, watching a boat which, after pa.s.sing me, was slowing down and stopping.