Tramping on Life. Harry 1883-1960 Kemp
threatened to kill him for his getting the better of them in some doubtful business transaction.
For a long time his meanness and sharp dealings were reserved for outsiders and he was generous with his family. And my sweet, simple, old grandmother belonged to all the societies, charitable and otherwise, in town … but she was not, never could be "smart." She was always saying and doing naïve things from the heart. And soon she began to disapprove of my grandfather's slick business ways.
I don't know just what tricks he put over … but he became persona non grata in local business circles … and he took to running about the country, putting through various projects here and there … this little, dressy, hard-faced man … like a cross between a weasel and a bird!
He dropped into Mornington, and out again, each time with a wild, restless story of fortunes to be made or in the making!
Once he came home and stayed for a longer time than usual. During this stay he received many letters. My grandmother noticed a furtiveness in his manner when he received them. My grandmother noticed that her husband always repaired immediately to the outhouse when he received a letter.
She followed after him one day, and found fragments of a torn letter cast below … she performed the disagreeable task of retrieving the fragments, of laboriously piecing them together and spelling them out. She procured a divorce as quietly as possible. Then my grandfather made his final disappearance. I did not see him again till I was quite grown up.
All support of his numerous family ceased. His sons and daughters had to go to work while still children, or marry.
My Aunt Alice married a country doctor whom I came to know as "Uncle Beck." My Uncle Joe, who inherited my grandfather's business-sense, with none of his crookedness, started out as a newsboy, worked his way up to half-proprietorship in a Mornington paper … the last I heard of him he had money invested in nearly every enterprise in town, and had become a substantial citizen.
My father still pursued his nomadic way of living, sending, very seldom, driblets of money to my grandmother for my support … my uncle Jim went East to work … of my uncle Landon I shall tell you later on.
The big house in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived was looking rather seedy by this time. The receding tide of fashion and wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing city … and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great, flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one … and a welter of strange people we then called the "low Irish" came to work in them, and our Mansion Avenue became "Kilkenny Row." And a gang of tough kids sprang up called the "Kilkenny Cats," with which my gang used to fight.
After the "Low Irish" came the "Dagoes" … and after them the "Hunkies" … each wilder and more poverty-stricken than the former.
The Industrial Panic of '95 (it was '95, I think) was on … always very poor since the breaking up of our family, now at times even bread was scarce in the house.
I was going to school, scrawny and freckle-faced and ill-nourished. I had a pet chicken that fortunately grew up to be a hen. It used to lay an egg for me nearly every morning during that hard time.
My early remembrances of school are chiefly olfactory. I didn't like the dirty boy who sat next to me and spit on his slate, rubbing it clean with his sleeve. I loved the use of my yellow, new sponge, especially after the teacher had taught me all about how it had grown on the bottom of the ocean, where divers had to swim far down to bring it up, slanting through the green waters. But the slates of most of the boys stunk vilely with their spittle.
I didn't like the smell of the pig-tailed little girls, either. There was a close soapiness about them that offended me. And yet they attracted me. For I liked them in their funny, kilt-like, swinging dresses. I liked the pudginess of their noses, the shiny apple-glow of their cheeks.
It was wonderful to learn to make letters on a slate. To learn to put down rows of figures and find that one and one, cabalistically, made two, and two and two, four!
It always seemed an age to recess. And the school day was as long as a month is now.
We were ready to laugh at anything … a grind-organ in the street, a passing huckster crying "potatoes," etc.
I have few distinct memories of my school days. I never went to kindergarten. I entered common school at the age of eight.
My grandfather, after his hegira from Mornington, left behind his library of travels, lives of famous American Statesmen and Business Men, and his Civil War books. Among these books were four treasure troves that set my boy's imagination on fire. They were Stanley's Adventures in Africa, Dr. Kane's Book of Polar Explorations, Mungo Park, and, most amazing of all, a huge, sensational book called Savage Races of the World … this title was followed by a score of harrowing and sensational sub-titles in rubric. I revelled and rolled in this book like a colt let out to first pasture. For days and nights, summer and winter, I fought, hunted, was native to all the world's savage regions in turn, partook gleefully of strange and barbarous customs, naked and skin-painted. I pushed dug-outs and canoes along tropic water-ways where at any moment an enraged hippopotamus might thrust up his snout and overturn me, crunching the boat in two and leaving me a prey to crocodiles … I killed birds of paradise with poison darts which I blew out of a reed with my nostrils … I burned the houses of white settlers … even indulged shudderingly in cannibal feasts.
The one thing that pre-eminently seized my imagination in Savage Races of the World was the frontispiece—a naked black rushing full-tilt through a tropical forest, his head of hair on fire, a huge feather-duster of dishevelled flame … somehow this appealed to me as especially romantic. I dreamed of myself as that savage, rushing gloriously through a forest, naked, and crowned with fire like some primitive sun-god. It never once occurred to me how it would hurt to have my hair burning!
When Aunt Millie was taken down with St. Vitus's dance, it afforded me endless amusement. She could hardly lift herself a drink out of a full dipper without spilling two-thirds of the contents on the ground.
Uncle Beck, the Pennsylvania Dutch country doctor who married Aunt Alice, came driving in from Antonville, five miles away, once or twice a week to tend to Millie, free, as we were too poor to pay for a doctor. I remember how Uncle Beck caught me and whipped me with a switch. For I constantly teased Aunt Millie to make her scream and cry.
"Granma," I used to call out, on waking in the morning. …
"Yes, Johnnie darling, what is it?"
"Granma, yesterday … in the woods back of Babson's barn, I killed three Indians, one after the other." (The funny part of it was that I believed this, actually, as soon as the words left my mouth.)
A silence. …
"Granma, don't you believe me?"
"Yes, of course, I believe you."
Aunt Millie would strike in with—"Ma, why do you go on humouring Johnnie while he tells such lies? You ought to give him a good whipping."
"The poor little chap ain't got no mother!"
"Poor little devil! If you keep on encouraging him this way he'll become one of the greatest liars in the country."
A colloquy after this sort took place more than once. It gave me indescribable pleasure to narrate an absurd adventure, believe it myself in the telling of it, and think others believed me. Aunt Millie's scorn stung me like a nettle, and I hated her.
In many ways I tasted practical revenge. Though a grown girl of nineteen, she still kept three or four dolls. And I would steal her dolls, pull their dresses for shame over their heads, and set them straddle the banisters.
We took in boarders. We had better food. It was good to have meat to eat every day.
Among the boarders was a bridge builder named Elton Reeves. Elton had a pleasant, sun-burnt face and a little choppy moustache beneath which his teeth glistened when he smiled.
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