Authors: MacKinlay Kantor
Song was born in Eben’s heart, song thrilled in his ears from his first moment of awareness; possibly that was why he was drawn to the birds. As his mother worshipped bloodroots which came up leaf-wrapped and pearly through poplar glades each spring, so her eldest saw a charm in the first robin to appear—a charm and a lure which he could not describe. In May, going out at daybreak to begin his chores, the caroling from nearby heights of trees would turn Eben into a statue. His father said, Come along there, Pillar of Salt. Come along, Lot’s Wife. Those are tuneful robins, but they won’t put any mush on the table.
Old Reverend Grosscup had a book called Our Feathered Friends, With Copious Illustrations, and Eben borrowed the book so frequently and kept it so long that finally Reverend Grosscup declared with some heat, Well, I see nothing to do but to present the book to you, Eben. Then you won’t always be pestering me for the lend of it. He wrote Eben’s name on the smudged fly-leaf with a flourish and gave him a little smack with his frail hand after the boy was holding the volume to his heart.
Ebe went into the fish business when he was nine or so. An old Indian, a Pottawatomie called John-John, used to come up the river on solitary excursions with his gun and traps, and he would beg for tea or sugar at Mrs. Dolliver’s cabin door. John-John watched young Eben trying to catch fish without success; he grunted and made signs, begging twine from Joth Dolliver. They had to keep plenty of twine at the mill, to tie and repair sacks. Well, that John-John sat down and wove a beautiful fish net. In only one day he put it together. Then he borrowed an axe, and shaped a wooden block, and into that wooden block he inserted four limber poles of willow. This block John-John mounted on a post something like a well-sweep, and the net was suspended to the four light springy poles. Above the mill flume the Indian placed this apparatus, and showed Eben how to lower the sweep until bending boughs of willow had spread the net across the bottom of the flume. There John-John insisted on leaving it stretched, though Eben was highly excited when he saw a large pickerel come nosing through the shadows. John-John knew how fish loved to swim away from sunlight, away from heated shallows, and lie twitching contentedly in cool shade of the flume. More fish came, more; Eben was fit to be tied. At last John-John let him throw his weight on the exalted sweep, and release the willows from their bending, and bring the net aloft, closing as it came. Little fish flopped out through the wide mesh but big fellows were trapped securely. Eben would always remember with a bounce of his heart: there were three pickerel and two enormous pike in that first net-load. John-John said, Uh, good, and made signs to the boy that the fish trap was his for keeps.
In time the net grew rotten, the willows corroded because of their constant drowning at the flume’s floor. But Eben could make other nets, he could cut more willow limbs. No one of his subsequent traps was as efficient as the one John-John had made, but they caught many fish. In certain seasons the mill ground day and night. Often there’d be a whole line of wagons whose owners waited their turn with grists. When the farmers were ready to head for home, they’d find Eben standing by. Wish some nice fresh fish to take home, Mr. Clark? Shouldn’t you like to give your folks a treat of fine fresh bass, Mr. Hurst, sir? I got five beauties—just pulled them up—some are still kicking. The prices had to be low, for no one on the prairie owned much cash in those years. But five cents here, ten cents there, twenty-three cents one day, twenty-nine another: it added up. Eben kept his money in a cracked ginger jar. When he thought he had enough, he approached Mr. Corey, the watchmaker in Webster City, on one of those rare occasions when he accompanied Joth Dolliver behind a borrowed nag across more than a dozen miles of grass. Sir, have you by any chance’t got a telescope for sale? No, bubby, but I got a catalogue with some pictures. It turned out that Eben didn’t have enough money as yet; but Mr. Corey said that he would order the telescope, and keep it for Eben until he was ready to pay. Ebe bought it that fall in time to watch the birds moving south. That was why he had yearned for a telescope: it could bring a bird into his lap, he could count the feathers in a jay’s tail, he could watch a distracted dainty warbler feeding the slob of a cowbird fledgling which she believed to be her own because he had been hatched in her small nest.
Eben Dolliver’s fingers were cased only in flesh. It took years for them to wear the golden finish off the telescope’s cheap brass, but they did wear it through. By the time he was sixteen you could see where his fingers clamped most often. The lenses were well ground nevertheless, and through them he won an intimacy with wrens which he would never have had without this device. His ambition outran all common sense. He read that nowadays, in cities, photographers had a splendid new method in their work, and could secure accurate likenesses on their wet plates of any object which remained still. If the object moved, of course the image was blurred. But take a brooding hen lark or a bobwhite. Sometimes she’d never flicked a feather or rolled her eye for as long as Eben observed her. Might it not be possible to take a picture of a brooding bird? But where might he find a modern machine for such photography, and how might he ever get together enough money to purchase it, and who might teach him to employ it? It would be more accurate than any artist’s conception in Our Feathered Friends, With Copious Illustrations.
Other people might have spoken severely about Eben’s addiction, except that he was known to be a stalwart worker. Joth Dolliver liked to say that he had two right hands. This one, attached by the arm to his shoulder— And that one. Over there. He meant Eben. Men chuckled when he said it, and Eben turned from tanned pink to beet red. It seemed a piddling sport, to most neighbors, when they discussed how Ebe put up a little shelf among plum trees next to the new-sided house, in winter, and begged scraps of gristle from his mother to place thereon for nuthatches and chickadees to eat. Also he learned that sunflower seeds were relished by birds, so each fall he worked among dry heads of rusty sunflowers, harvesting against the snowy season.
Strangers came to the mill—new people, usually, who had just taken up land in the vicinity—and they heard that Eben was by way of being an ornithologist. That’s interesting, boy. Have you got a lot of them stuffed? Eben stared, horrified at the idea. He thought that he might be able to shoot a human being if Fate required it of him, but was positive that he could kill no bird. Some boys from the village of Homer came past the mill with a pocket rifle; they were shooting at kingfishers along the river; they said that the feathers would make a beautiful dressing for ladies’ bonnets. Eben dove off the loading platform and attempted to impound the instrument of death, and got a trouncing for his pains; there were three of the boys, two of them huskier than he. But in the process he awarded two bloody noses to the victorious party, and they did not stalk kingfishers within his domain again. Honestly he thought that the birds were his, even on land not belonging to his father, even in thick timber which was the property of Bells and Bryans. He watched a yellow-breasted chat and thought, No one could make gold like that. No human, no mint in the world.
He was seventeen when cannon roared on a South Carolina shoreline and a call went up for volunteers. Eben and his father attended a rally at Homer where the Democrats broke down the Republican flagpole and Republicans dislodged the Democratic pole. The two poles were spliced together and raised on high in a new location, and the Colors went crinkling to the top. White-haired Beriah Seton, who had served in the War of 1812, stood up on a wagon seat and fired a pepperbox revolver at the sky. Men joined hands—a few women joined hands too, and a great many small boys. They circled slowly around the spliced poles, singing, Hail, Columbia, Happy Land.
Joth Dolliver was silent as they walked the five miles toward home under stars that evening. For Joth to be silent was to say that he was sick in bed.
What ails you, Pap?
Ebe, I was just trying to cipher out some way to go.
I’m going.
No you ain’t.
Yes I am. You forget I’m practically man-grown. Seventeen.
Ebe, you’d have to have my permission, and I won’t give it. Your Ma would be broken-hearted if I let you traipse to the army. I’m bigger’n more able than you, if I am past the age; and I’m a better scrapper. I can still lay you on your back. Do you reckon you could conduct the mill by your lonesome?
No I don’t. Furthermore, there’s that hundred and sixty-five dollars to be paid to Mr. Bell for the machinery you bought off him, and how’d I ever manage to pay that, come July first?
I know, Ebe . . . it beats me. But somehow I’m going. You ain’t.
We’ll see about that.
No we won’t.
They stopped on the old Mesquakie trail through springtime thickets, and looked at each other in darkness. They laughed, and shook their heads in much the same manner, and then went on. Presently Eben struck up, Father And I Went Down To Camp. Joth joined with him. Elizabeth Dolliver and the younger children heard those voices among bare trees and spreading through the glades where hepaticas grew (hepaticas couldn’t be seen in the dark, but they were there, ready to reveal silk on their stems when daylight came), long before Jotham and Eben struck their feet against the bridge’s timbers. They fell silent, pausing there and listening to the rush of water across the dam. They stopped at the mill to see that everything was right; then they went home, and each lay awake for a time, planning.
Eben was the first to go. In midsummer his father’s sister fell sick in Marshall County, and wrote that she was having a hard time; could Dear Brother spare some cash? Her hands were crippled and she couldn’t sew, and actually there was little in the house to eat. She had written to her married daughter in Kansas, but perhaps the letter had gone astray, for no word came. Jotham Dolliver dared not leave his mill; he was dressing both corn and wheat burrs against the next season, and had other repairs to make. Accordingly Ebe was dispatched with twelve dollars in currency—all that could be scraped up—and an old watch and snuff-box in his pocket which should be sold in Marshalltown and the money given to Aunt Esther. Stages cost too much; he walked part of the way, and was picked up by two movers in turn, so it didn’t take him long to reach Marshalltown. There he sold watch and snuff-box for even more than the minimum which his parents had agreed that he should accept, and with delight he walked to a nearby village and presented the money to his aunt, trusting that it would see her through her disability until she was able to resume dressmaking once more. He spent the night on Aunt Esther’s sofa, and at dawn was up and away, spy-glasses in hand, reveling in the activity of orioles and grosbeaks. Back in Marshalltown, he enlisted promptly in the Fifth Iowa Infantry, which was then being raised, giving his age as eighteen. This was a thing which explicitly he had promised his father that he would not do.
...Never have I uttered an untruth to you before, dear father, nor gone back on my word. But now I take up my pen for confeshin. I am bound to be a soldier and already am one in name. We were mustered in, here at Burlington, yesterday. I regret deeply that I was false to the vow you extrackted from me but trust you will forgive and forget. You are capuble of supporting the family whilst I am not. Hence it is My Stint not yours. Our Nation is in dire peril and if a nat’s brain and a nat’s fist may be of service, why, Uncle Samuel, here is your nat. Give my dearest love to Ma and remember me fondly to the girls and to Neri, Jake and Jess. Warn Neri not to attempt
crowbaticks
on the water gate as is his wont. I have my telescope along, and shall see many strange wildfowl in the Sunny South, so I hear. May the Heavenly Father keep and fend for thee. Y’r Affec’n’t Son.
It was less than two years later, during the hundred-day siege of Vicksburg, when Eben received a letter from his father telling of the elder Dolliver’s being commissioned as a lieutenant in Company G, Seventh Iowa Cavalry. A neighbor named Ennis, a man with some milling experience, was to look after operations at Dolliver’s Mill; he agreed to pay Elizabeth Dolliver fifty per cent of the net profit. Jotham went out to Nebraska Territory, and one day, ten miles from Fort Cottonwood, he was shot down by a party of Cheyennes who tore off his silver scalp and built a hot fire between his legs so that he might not be able to procreate in the Next World. Had they known that he took pleasure in song, they would also have cut out his tongue, since he was the enemy of the Indians and they did not wish him to have pleasure.
...Miseries such as these roved through Ebe Dolliver’s brain as he lay wrapped in his tattered quilt, in an open Georgia forest along the Southwestern Railroad. He did not know the details of his father’s death; he knew only that he had been killed by Indians. The letter reached him shortly before the long march from Memphis to Chattanooga. Also there came news that Mr. Ennis was doing well with the mill, which relieved Ebe of certain worries concerning his mother, the girls, and Jake and Jesse. Neri had already run away to war, and was believed to be somewhere in Arkansas.
Ebe thought of his father, he thought of Indians, he thought of old John-John, he wondered whether John-John had ever killed and scalped a white man. Maybe he had, in some remote period when Pottawatomies warred against encroaching settlers . . . head hurt. Blame that guard! There he was huddled against that tree over yonder past the nearest log fire. Like to crack him over his fat head with his own musket. Bet he’d never forget it.
Eben thought of the stew they’d been given, two nights before, and wished he had some now.
Suddenly he was sitting up, pushing himself up, holding himself up by his dirty hands spread against the ground. He had been lifted by a cry. There it was again . . . question and answer in the damp February sky, the sky holding no stars, no light. Only it held a mystic summons, a silver horning which might have been blown by the breath of ghosts or fairies.
Hear it?
he wanted to call to the guards and to the snoring, moaning, grunting herd of prisoners around him like swine in a wallow. Geese, ducks, elusive runaways, I know not. But they are birds of some sort, and they are going north, free and keen and shrilling about it as they have shrilled through the millennia. Oh, to be vaulting in empty blackness, to be flying with silent force as no others but the birds have gone. To unfasten from the throat that challenging whoop which is not a song, thin and far, and yet haunts as no other melody pealed. To understand the question asked, the answer awarded. . . .