Nobody's Hero. Frank Laumer
took the oath of affirmation, repeating after him; “I, Ransom Clark, . . . do solemnly swear . . . that I will bear true allegiance to the United States of America, . . . and that I will serve them honestly and faithfully . . . against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever; . . and observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States, . . . and the orders of the officers appointed over me.”
Clark had heard tell that there had been a twelve-dollar bounty given every man who enlisted, but Hetzel told him that it was no longer offered. On the other hand, a private’s pay had recently been raised to seven dollars per month, eighty-four a year. A common laborer might make a hundred dollars, but in addition to his pay, a soldier was provided with food, clothing, and shelter as well as medical care. He could travel, learn, put some money aside. And he was a soldier now, a man.
Benjamin Clark, Ransom’s father, had a house, barns, two hundred and fifty acres where he kept cows, raised hay, peas, corn, beans, potatoes, and hell. He was considered well to do. He was a hard man, hard as the rocks in his fields. His own attorney, Henry Chamberlin, stated that he was more coarse and brutal to his own family, his wife Catherine and their ten children, than any man he had ever known.
The nearest neighbor was half a mile away but Benjamin thought him too close. He knew only those he had to know and disliked most of them. Strangers, even neighbors, were sometimes stoned and dogged away. He had come to the area twenty years before but resented as intruders the Irish who were settling in the area and scorned the few remaining Seneca Indians as savages. He kept liquor by him constantly and, though rarely sober, was still considered to be a sharp, hard bargainer by men who had known him for twenty years and more.
Benjamin had trouble getting workmen and couldn’t keep them when he did, often losing his hay crop for lack of help. The haying season was a long five or six weeks from late June through early August, the hardest labor on a farm. He would scour the neighborhood for haying help but only the desperate would work for him. He paid little and grudged that. Haying was hard steady work through fourteen- to sixteen-hour days, but most young men accepted it as a physical challenge and competition, swinging the long-handled scythes from dawn to noon, stopping only to whet their blades on grindstones brought into the field. They took their noon meal where they stood and worked till last light, raking, spreading, and turning the cut grass to cure into hay. A threat of rain added desperation to the work, every hand rushing to get the hay under cover or rolled into cocks to keep it from rotting.
Men had learned that old Benjamin worked them harder than other farmers, paid them less, and never provided the tot of rum or brandy during brief rests that others did. By law and custom he could claim the labor of his children until maturity and he worked his sons, Ransom, Henry, even crippled William, harder than hired hands would tolerate. He grudged them food and shelter, paid them nothing. He had been heard to remark, when speaking of Ransom, “I never liked the boy.” Even Chamberlin had more than once taken a damning from him even while representing him in court with one controversy or lawsuit after another. When he wasn’t being sued he was suing others, including even the boys, Henry and William. When he was too drunk to leave his bed he demanded that the smaller children bring him whisky in a cup, neighbors half a mile away sometimes hearing him rip out. He was not alone in this indulgence. By 1830 liquor consumption in the United States had reached the equivalent of ten gallons per year for every man, woman, and child. This in turn was giving rise to the temperance movement.
In May 1830, Ransom had had all the hard labor and harder treatment he wanted. He hated to leave his mother and his younger sisters and brothers to take the constant abuse old Benjamin handed out. He had begged his mother to get out, take the children, but she had nowhere to go, no way to support them all. “Come with me,” he had said. “Leave the old bastard! I can get work, Ma. We can make it. Ain’t no call for you and the little ones to take it no more.” She had hugged him, her stocky little body clinging, then pushed him away. “You go, Ransom. We’ll hang on a little more. It ain’t so bad, he won’t really hurt us.” She looked at the floor. “He ain’t a bad man, son. Just he can’t leave off the drink. Life ain’t been easy for him, all the children. . . . ” Her voice trailed off.
She had met and married Benjamin more than twenty years ago. He was tall, strong, a man with a head for business, but hard even then. Through the years, through ten births, she had cooked, fed, endured. She jerked her head up. “But you, you got all your life yet to go, you got to live.” She took his arms in a fierce grip, squeezed. “You’re a good boy Ransom, a good man. You go on. Me and the little ones’ll make it. He’s partial to William. He stands up for us, like you and Henry. You don’t worry now, son. You go, you live.”
Two younger sisters, Lydia and Betsey, had already escaped through marriage and immediately been disinherited. And sure enough, on the 12th of May Benjamin advertised in the Livingston Register, “My son, Ransom Clark, left me on the 10th inst., without my consent or approbation. Said boy is 18 yrs old, rather large for his age, and of a dark complexion. All persons are hereby forbid harboring, employing, or trusting him on my account.”
Benjamin had never given Ransom much more than homespun trousers and shirt, cast-off shoes, a knife in a slim leather sleeve, had taught him only to work and to curse. He had found work in the area, hiring out in Greigsville, Wadsworth, Leicester, a few miles north in York and five miles east in the county seat, the village of Geneseo. Brutal work, but not half as brutal as working for old Benjamin. Farmers would give him board, room in their barns. And he foraged. He would take an ear of corn here or there while working, shuck it, eat it raw. As he moved from farm to farm, job to job, he learned to recognize the thorny vines and bushes, the frail flower of the wild rose. In season its blossoms developed a reddish-orange berrylike fruit with a taste like apple. He found blackberries, raspberries, salmon, dew, cloud, and thimbleberries, juicy little fruits, each drawn together like a cap over a central head at the end of a stem. He was tempted sometimes to try the wild mushrooms but remembered a childhood friend who tried one after seeing a squirrel eat the same type, only to develop cramps and vomiting fifteen hours later, just before he died. Turned out it was the deadly Amanita. Ransom learned to identify the salad plants and herbs that grew wild in the woods, to enjoy the clean, bitter tang of dandelion, not only the yellow flowers but leaves and hollow stems as well.
For a while, working sunup to sundown left no hours when he could safely visit Ma and the children. Sometimes, on a Saturday, he’d hang around the tavern in Greigsville, wait for old Benjamin, then get out to the farm for a few minutes. He’d take a dollar or two for Ma when he could, trinkets, candy for Jacob, Sally, Katherine, and Carolyn.
Farmers, seeing how he worked, began to hire him whenever he showed up, liking his size, his strength, his sober ways. Ransom Clark, they found, was all business. He rarely smiled, except with children. He said little. He worked. He knew farming, he knew plants, animals, could get an ox to draw when even the owner couldn’t make him move. Fields that hadn’t raised a weed began to bring forth hay, potatoes, corn.
With the deep-furrow horse-drawn moldboard plow he would turn and cross-turn a field to start the hills three or four feet apart for corn, drop and cover the seeds. He’d plant all day, backbreaking work, the next day haul water in two big wooden buckets for the seedlings, doling it out like he was nursing a baby. And they grew. Tall and strong, like Ransom.
Farmers, finding that he was sleeping in the fields, began letting him use their hay lofts, sometimes eat at table with them and their families. He had never known that a home could be like this. “Please” and “thank you” were not terms he was accustomed to. He tried to remember the manners Ma had taught him: keep your elbows off the table; eat with a spoon or a fork, not your fingers; don’t spit on the floor; and never drink liquor.
From the time he left home until spring he found employment with one farmer and another. Every farmer’s corn needed cultivation. Spring planting was done. He began the hoeing; first the weeding, then the half-hilling, then the full hilling. In fall he cut the ripened ears off the stalks, stored them in the farmer’s barn. Husking and shelling were fall and winter work and a time for frolics, a time to share and celebrate the end of the harvest. Ransom had no friends, nor enemies for that matter. He took no part in frolics. If he had an entertainment it was throwing his knife.
He