7. The Old Home

It was midwinter. Deep in the night, Mama shook me awake. Papa was sick. Groggy with sleep I followed her downstairs to their bedroom. Papa looked dazed, bewildered. One side of his face sagged peculiarly. He was mumbling something unintelligible, and trying to lift his right hand with his left one.

“Papa has had a stroke!” Mama said. “You’d better go for the doctor.”

I flogged our sleepy horse into a stiff-legged trot and rode to North Webster, six miles away.

“Your mama is right,” Doctor Williams said, after I had told him my story. “I would gladly go with you, my boy, if your father was in pain. There’s nothing I can do now. Make him comfortable. I’ll be over directly after breakfast.”

“Will Papa get well?” I wanted to know.

“Perhaps,” the doctor replied. “Many times they do get well. Did he have much trouble with his breathing?”

I told Doctor Williams that I hadn’t noticed.

“That’s good,” he said. “Tell him I said not to worry.”

* * * * *

Papa’s enforced inactivity did not worry him. As I have told you earlier, he was not very good at worrying. But he was bored by his idleness as he sat, month after month, with empty hands. Gradually his speech returned. Sensation was slowly restored to his right hand. It was a great day for him when he was able to write a letter.

Again Clyde and I were busy in the garden. Our half-brothers and sisters came to visit Papa. Some brought their families. Our brothers went fishing. They borrowed shotguns and brought in fat gray squirrels from the woods. Mama had done well with her chickens. The young Plymouth Rock fryers lost their heads by the half-dozen. Lou had a vacation and helped Mama in the kitchen. We were well visited that summer, but not much out of pocket, for the food represented labor; not money. And many of the fish we ate were caught by our visitors.

Late in the summer, good old Doctor Gottwald, a professor in the Theological Seminary at Wittenberg College, drove from Columbia City to see Papa. He had been out beating the bushes for gifts to the Seminary’s endowment fund. He may have thought that Papa might introduce him to some of the Leigh Hunt money. But Mr. Hunt was abroad and couldn’t be reached.

However, Doctor Gottwald accepted the warm invitation to remain with us for a couple of days. Mama told him I was planning to go into the ministry, though that was going to be difficult. Doctor Gottwald had access to a scholarship fund. He said it was only a hundred dollars but it would pay tuition and fees in the Academy. I could easily find a job, he thought, to pay for my board and room. So it was settled that I should attend our country school another year, which would complete the equivalent of the eighth grade. A year from now I would enter “Second Prep” at Springfield, Ohio. Perhaps I should mention that Papa told the Professor of our informal chats about Greek and Latin. Doctor Gottwald had seemed surprised. I think it may have influenced him a little in offering to help me.

Well, I think that about buttons up the story of my childhood. The next time we meet I shall be a pretty cocky Second Prep, with a sore tongue and a new clay pipe, than which nothing is hotter than a candied sweet potato. I had just bought, for twenty dollars cash, the entire contents of a room on the fourth floor of the men’s dorm which a Junior Theologue had just vacated; a bed, worn-out springs, worn-out mattress, desk, one desk chair, two very shabby upholstered chairs, a small coal stove, a coal scuttle, a shovel, a washstand with a large bowl and a pitcher with nose missing, a slop jar, and a very dirty, tattered, home-woven rag carpet. It was indeed a rag carpet. My people were poor, but I had never lived in a dump like that.