Everybody in our town knew the Billpens. They lived in a small house Mr. Billpen had hammered together by the side of the railroad tracks, about two miles out of town, and there were so many Billpen kids that no one knew really how many. The little house was just full of them. Mama told me (in great secret) they were found in cabbages.
Mr. Billpen was a lean, tall man with blond hair almost white, and a face all pinfeathers between his weekly shaves… and the face was always smiling. Mrs. Billpen was a round little woman always with a baby in her arms, and a few ducks that she was taking to market to sell. And the Billpen kids were every place—cutting wood, selling newspapers, cutting lawns. They laughed at the cabbage story.
The Billpens were history, you see. There had been a Billpen with Washington at the Battle of Trenton, and there had been a Captain Billpen with Grant in the Wilderness… he never came back, and the family got along the hard way, but managed to live by the railroad track and raise up their brood and go along being part of the town, even out where they were. They did not drink out of the nose of the teapot as some railroad families did.
Mr. Billpen had built the house after the river flooded and washed out the old one, taking all the pigs and hens with it. Mr. Billpen and the kids gathered old boards and built a good, solid little house, and then found roofing paper beyond their means… so they cut river hay, and Mr. Billpen tied it into bundles and put on a hay roof, just the kind he had seen in a book about England.
Now, the trouble between Mama and the Billpens, and love, really started when Jed Billpen started to be seen around the better roads Sundays, with my Aunt Fran.
Mama was all for love. She spoke very highly of it to Papa, and Papa would nod and agree with her; it was a wonderful thing. It certainly was for Mama and Papa… because everyone always said it must be love that kept Mama staying with Papa… he was always failing in business, and he never read the best authors or collected art. Papa was just a man who wanted to do two things: stay in love with Mama and make a lot of money. Anyway, Mama always said her sister Fran wouldn't make the same mistake she did, and marry just for love.
“There is something higher than that, Mr. L.,” Mama would say.
“Yes,” said Papa. “Heaven is over us all.”
Mama couldn't answer that one, but she looked at Papa as if he were trying to put a hot one over on her. “Now this Jed Billpen.”
“Fine second baseman,” said Papa. “We saw him play against Milltown. Remember?”
“Fran is seeing too much of him.”
“Been swimming again, have they?”
Mama did not think Papa was a wit. “Never mind the bar-room humor. I want Fran to take up with someone better. More in her class.”
Mama came from an old family… not Indians, of course—the only real Americans… but she always thought of anyone who came after 1890, or who didn't have sixteen bent spoons and a bad old clock, as not being part of the American past. The Billpens fooled her by being old-stock natives… but they didn't have any spoons or old clock to prove it… “You must find a young man for Fran.”
Papa said he would, and went in to see how supper was coming.
A good soufflé would always take Papa's mind off Mama's worry over Aunt Fran. Soufflé Longstreet was something he was very proud of. He would beat four egg yolks. To this he would add two ounces of melted bacon fat, half a pint of milk, and salt, white and red pepper, and grated nutmeg to taste.
Still beating, Papa would add a pound of finely chopped cooked pork, as lean as he could get, one grated red onion, and one clove of garlic rubbed to a paste. In this he folded the whites of the eggs well beaten, and a fistful of minced parsley, green and red pepper, chive, and chervil.
Then he would butter the best half-dozen sea shells I had collected at Atlantic City (when Mama and I paid our first visit to the Million Dollar Pier that season). He would pack them with the mixture and put them in a hot oven for thirty-five minutes. They came out fit for gobbling, and Papa would call Mama and we would sit down and eat two each… after which I washed the sea shells.
Mama was a dainty eater. She always thought a lot white eating, and soufflé brought out her best ideas, Papa always said… in self-defense, I suspect.
Mama said, “A girl like Fran… she has everything. Two years' high school, a half interest in my Papa's oil well.”
“Honey, there is no oil in Vermont.”
“You mean they haven't found it yet.”
“No, they haven't, have they?”
“No,” said Mama, with that cold-in-the-head voice. “Stevie, take your elbows off the table.”
Papa said, “I admit Fran has a lot for a small town.”
“Too much for Jed Billpen,” said Mama, closing the conversation for the evening…
Well, the next day I went down to the depot where Jed Billpen was a freight clerk. He made out bills of lading and h'isted freight on a handcart, and was very handsome and had huge muscles and could roll cigarettes one-handed, and, of course, he was going to play second base with the Yankees some day. In those days, being all that was better than being president of a bank. All great men started almost like that.
Jed saw me as I stood on the depot brick steps waiting for the A.M. Express to roll flat some pennies I had placed on the rails…
“Stevie,” said Jed. “You're a real man now. Let me feel your arm.”
I let him.
“Stevie… that's hard as iron. You'll be in there pitching a hard game of ball soon.”
“Oh, I want to be manager and pass the hat.”
“You do take after your family,” he said, and then he slipped me a note smelling of eating tobacco. “Now you give this to your Aunt Fran at supper, and you'll be free to come in and watch me load steers any time you want.”
“Ought I?”
“You're a man now,” said Jed.
“Well…”
“You've got to figure these things out for yourself.”
“Aunt Fran expecting it?”
“That's a sport,” said Jed, and went off to help a crate of turkeys towards a roasting oven 400 miles away.
Of course I gave Fran the note, and she went out after supper to run down to the drug store “to see about a new rat for her hair.” I offered her the six I had in a cage in the barn, but she said no, thank you.
The next day I went out past the factories to the Billpen place to see the new straw roof Mr. Billpen had put on their house.
It looked very fine… and people passing on the Big Express must have looked down on it and wondered how it came there… and then they forgot it and waited for the great city to come panting and leaping into view twenty-five miles away.
But we kids… I used to go to visit the Billpens and play Indians and Tiger Hunting in the river meadows with them. We used to sit by the rail lines and watch the fast trains pass, and very beautiful people would sit at crisp white tables and be served rare foods in silver trays by giant black men. The trains never stopped, but passed in a grind and rush, and the dust would fall back slowly and nothing much would happen on the rail lines again until another train was due…
Mr. Billpen used to shake his head and say he couldn't believe it… “People eating soup on a train going sixty miles an hour… how do they keep it out of their laps?” It was too much for him, and he would go up to the stove works and help load stoves into freight cars. Mr. Billpen did any kind of work… there were a lot of little Billpens to feed.
The stove works were about a mile above the rail line, connected by a single track spur, and the stoves would be loaded into three or four cars, and when they were loaded, they waited up there until a willing freight train passed. Then a small, puffing engine would push them down the easy grade to the main lines, and the freight train would break open and the stove cars would hook up, and the train would come together and the whole long worm of weathered freight cars would chug chug off to market…
One day Mr. Billpen got a letter on very crisp paper… paper as white and slick as the tablecloths in the Big Express dining cars… and they said the Billpen house was on railroad land and he would have to get off… which puzzled Mr. Billpen, who had never met a lawyer in his life or understood legal writing. He asked me, but I was not bright either…
When I got home, Mama was sitting in the big sofa in her room weeping softly to herself, and I went up to her and she took me in her arms and said… “Oh, Stevie, you have a dreadful mother.”
“No, I haven't. You don't keep goats like Mike's mother.”
“Does she?”
“Phew!” I said.
“Oh, Stevie, I've done something dreadful to the Billpens.”
“Have you?”
“I had the railroad send them a notice.”
“The one to get off the land?”
“That one… I didn't mean to. I just met Mr. Marble, their lawyer, and he said the railroad was clearing off its land claims, and Papa was thinking of buying up the land for small factories… we're going to be rich soon. Papa has a wonderful idea.”
“Yes, Mama… Papa always has… but about the Billpens.”
“Oh… I said maybe Papa could use that spot and Mr. Marble… he's a Republican and has no heart, you know.”
“No?”
“No… he sent them notice… and now I'm sick about it. How many little Billpens are there?”
“Nobody really knows, Mama. Except maybe Mrs. Billpen.”
“I must do something.”
“How about Fran and Jed getting married and they could all live with us?”
Mama looked at me, and reached for her cold cream. “Sometimes I think you take after Gramp and his love of gypsies… You just haven't any brains and are too artistic at times.”
I went to see Mr. Billpen and tried to explain lawyers, dividends, stockholders, and management of big property. All he knew was that the Billpens had lived on that land for two hundred years… and it seemed unfair that the railroad lobbies should pass a law saying any wild land lying along their right-of-way should belong, after a period of time, to them. That is neither here nor there… as the Billpens didn't think their land was wild.
Mr. Billpen found a lawyer… but when he heard he would have to fight in court for years and help pay for the lawyer's new house and son in college, he just got himself some shotgun shells and built a heavy door, and said let them come, and Mrs. Billpen kept hot water always boiling on the stove…
“Quick! How does it go again— feed a cold and starve a fever?”
Nothing happened except more letters… and a great wire fence that ran for miles along the right of way, so that Mr. Billpen couldn't cross over the rails to go to the stove factory to help load cars, but had to walk five miles out of his way.
So the Billpens just looked at the fence and went on living as usual, and the letters from the railroad got a little harder to understand. Once we threw stones at the Big Express, but Mr. Billpen explained to us that trains are sacred, that they carry and hurry and take things to market, and we mustn't think that because some Johnny-in-an-office made mistakes the trains were to blame.
The Big Express used to pass at 8:02, and on a dark night it was a grand sight. First, five miles down the line, there would be a shrill whistle, then a roar of steam, then a humming that would shake the poles and the copper wires blue-green overhead, then one great yellow yolk of an eye would peep up out of the India ink darkness and the Express would roar past us like a bit of hell…
Mama made one more play to keep Fran and Jed Billpen apart. Papa was sitting up late with his new land plan. And Mama came in from a hard day at the strawberry festivals.
“Henry… we're going to hear some opera.”
“Uncle Tom's Cabin coming?” I asked.
“We're going to New York,” said Mama. “Dinner at the Waldorf… have your tail pressed, Mr. L. (Mama never learned that evening clothes were called by the full set: tails). And Stevie, get your hair cut… and don't save the fifteen cents by having the fire department use the horse clippers on you.”
“Opera?” said Papa. “New York?”
“Faust,” said Mama, “at the Met. I have always loved Wagner.”
“Not Faust,” said Papa. “That wasn't Wagner's. Much as I hate him, I can't blame Faust on him.”
Mama said, “You can blame Fran for Faust. I'm taking her and Jed with us. Once she sees this plow-boy in a big city and with cultured people, she'll give him up… you'll see.”
“That will cost money,” said Papa.
“If it was your sister,” said Mama, “your sister married to a freight hand.”
“I haven't got a…”
“Don't tell me for the hundredth time you haven't got a sister. I am only making a point…”
I knew what making a point in the pool room was; it was done with dice. But Mama could make it just by talking…
It was no secret, of course, that Mama and Aunt Fran were the most beautiful women in town… but on the train to New York and in the cab drive to the hotel I think they were the two most beautiful women in New York…
Fran was really dressed up, and Mama had put on a “few rags” that cost Papa one of his best lots. Jed was wearing a smartly tailored Sears Roebuck—neat, but not loud, and dark enough to match in with Papa's “tail,” which was beginning to show signs of wear.
I was dressed in tight dark short pants, bare legs, and a close haircut like a lawn cut by a mower from which a blade was missing (so was a bit of my ear—Mr. Zimmerman was getting a little old for a barber).
It was good to see New York. I hadn't seen it since Gramp and I used to live high there, and were known as two of the sights of the town. Gramp was in California… had been for several years, a very, very old man resting by the blue sea… and everyone felt nothing could happen now… unless he eloped one morning to Mexico with his nurse.
Jed was not much worried about the big city. He walked into the Waldorf as if he worked there, and we went to our rooms. Mama and Fran had one, and Papa and I and Jed had one.
Papa shaved… the second time that day. Jed combed his hair and put on a black bow tie, and winked at me, and we went to the opera.
We were late. It had already started. We had good seats in a box that Mama had loaned from a friend of Gramp's who hated opera, but appeared there once a year to show her heirs she wasn't dead.
On stage a large black man was making love to a small girl in a nightgown.
“Faust…” said Mama.
“Played by a colored man?” asked Papa.
“Tuskegee,” hissed Mama. “They have some very fine colored singers…”
“They don't look happy,” said Fran, sliding in under Jed's arm.
“Opera is very unhappy,” said Jed.
“Please,” said Mama… “shhhh.”
“I read it in a book,” said Jed.
The colored man began to cry and weep. We sat there, and the little girl sprayed sound at us, and every time the colored man wept the drummer hit the big drum and took a bow. Papa's collar wilted, and Jed said, “Opera is better than it sounds,” and Mama looked at him, and Jed said that he read that, too, from a book…
After a while Mama said, “Now Faust betrays her, she sings the Jewel Song, and then is burned alive and she goes to heaven… Faust finding he has lost his soul to the devil…”
“Shhhhhhh shhhh…” said seven people at once.
“Well!” said Mama, and turned around and watched the colored man suddenly take a pillow and smother the little girl on a bed. Mama looked puzzled and bit her lips, and when it was over we went out into the lobby. Mama said. “They certainly modernize these stories, don't they, Mr. L.?”
Papa nodded and looked at me, and I looked at a poster saying OTHELLO TONIGHT… and Papa looked at me that he would drop-kick me across Broadway if I said anything… it shows you how much Papa loved Mama. Anyway, we had a late dinner at the Waldorf, and one thing Mama could do—she could order a meal and look at Papa and smile, and give us all the impression (to say nothing of the two waiters) that Papa had thought it all up and ordered it all himself.
One of Mama's great pleasures was Melon à l'India, which is very hard to find now, but in those days the Waldorf always managed to have it on hand.
Mama said it reminded her of temple dancers and Kipling and that Russian who wrote The Song of India and long knives and natives killing Englishmen. It certainly reminded her of a lot.
It is made like this… if you ever want to feel like Mama eating Melon à l'India. Peel or pare a good-sized chilled cantaloupe, and slice the flesh the way you would an orange, into segments. Clean off the seeds and the threads, and dry with a cloth. Take rock candy—the oldfashioned kind—hammer it into dust, and dip the slices of melon into it. Add a teaspoon of Kirsch to a slice, pouring it over the rock candy and melon. Put the segments back in place until you have a whole melon again, holding it together with little metal pins if you have to.
Put the melon into a watertight melon mold, and pack in a freezer with three parts ice lumps and one part rock salt. Keep it there for three hours, then open, remove the pins, and serve.
Mama was very proud of that dish, and when it came, she served it and watched Jed eat it. But Jed acted as if it were just good ol' muskmelon with candy and rum… which in a way it almost was.
“Very good,” said Jed.
“Melon à l'India,” said Mama. “It means Melon of India.”
“That's what I thought,” said Jed. “French, isn't it?”
“Yes, it is,” said Mama, who would have liked to answer in French, but she was a little weak in verbs, and all she remembered of her lessons was, “The aunt of my uncle has a cat with a large tail.” Which is a humdinger of a line, but no good if someone asks if a dish is named in French… unless, of course, you are eating Cat à l'Orientale, which the Waldorf didn't serve… not then, anyway.
After the meal Papa ordered two good cigars and gave me his cigar band, and Mama and Fran went off among the palm trees, to see about their hair…
Papa and Jed sat there smoking, and Jed nodded to a lean man at the bar drinking Rhine wine with fizz. Papa said, “You feel pretty much at home here, Jed?”
Jed smiled. “Well, I should… I put in their baggage system. In fact I used to put in the baggage transfer system for all the hotels… but it got very boring. The big city isn't for me…”
“Does Fran know?”
“About me having lived in New York?”
“Well, yes.”
“Well, I tell you, Mr. Longstreet. I'm afraid to tell her. She might want to live here. I want to buy a few acres of land and some good standing timber and cut ties for the railroad company.”
“I see.”
“I want to get married and settle down in a small town… like my father… even if they are trying to move him off the land.”
“Noble thing, marriage,” said Papa (who said what he thought even if he had only a few good thoughts, but those he did have were of the best. Today people have a lot of thoughts… but they haven't the deep, solid honesty my father's had).
Mama and Fran came back from the palm trees, and Mama said, “Stevie is tired. I'll send him to bed with a bellboy.”
“I don't want to sleep with a bellboy,” I said.
“No, dear… just to show you the way.”
A few hours later I was awakened by a banging on my door. I sat up and Papa was sleeping on the bed beside me. I shook him, and he went to the door, and there was Mama with her coat over her nightgown.
“Fran isn't in yet.”
Papa yawned and smiled. “That's all right. Neither is Jed.”
“But don't you see… they are out together?”
“They say New York is up all night.”
“Oh, Henry, they'll get married.”
“Now, Sara…” said Papa. “There isn't anything wrong in getting married. I was afraid you were going to say they weren't.” And he looked at me as if he shouldn't talk in front of me. Papa had led a very sheltered life… even Gramp had not expected too much of him, because he always said Papa was a gentle soul who had the misfortune to be a gentleman.
Mama looked heartbroken, and came in and sat on Papa's pants draped over a chair, and Papa gave her a drink of water.
Just then the door opened, and Jed came in yawning and smiling.
Mama rose. “Where have you been?”
“On the North River. The Astors were giving a party and Fran had never been on a yacht before. You would have enjoyed it.”
Mama sparked fire from her beautiful eyes. “A fine story! The Astor yacht, indeed!”
Jed said, “Well, you see the young Astor… the family owns a lot of railroad stock… the young one was working his way up to a vice president's job on the line… from the bottom. He started as a freight handler, and I showed him around. We became very good friends.”
“I see,” said Mama. But she didn't. “And he's been after me to send in a bid for railroad ties since he's been in charge of the supply department, and I called him and he said come on over to the pier and… you ill, Mrs. Longstreet?”
“Did Fran have a good time?” asked Mama.
Jed looked worried and sighed. “Well, she danced with Mr. Astor… and she asked him how his mother's pet horse was. Hey, I think Mrs. Longstreet has fainted!”
In the morning Jed went out and bought Fran a speck of pure white carbon and put it on her finger, and they told Mama that they were engaged. Mama was too weak to protest. I do not think my Aunt Fran ever found out that Mrs. Astor didn't keep a pet horse.
Those were the days of long engagements… and Papa and Jed drove around looking for wood lots and the right kind of water. The Billpens came once to our house… a Sunday afternoon… and Mama gave them all watermelon and iced tea, and we played in the grass a game called mumbly peg with pocket knives, and I was cut on the thumb.
The engaged couple sat on the lower steps and fed each other ice cream out of plates. Mama had a headache and went upstairs to lie down. Love had won… but Mama had tried to steer nature, and even if she had failed, she had seen Faust with a colored actor in the start part, and she had almost seen an Astor yacht.
Old Mr. Billpen went back to fighting the railroad, and I used to stay over, and watch the Express come past. That was the real thrill of the Billpens, who didn't have an Aunt Fran to kiss.
This thrill passed, as I shall tell here later, but while it lasted it was a great thrill. The dark, sharp night… the grinding yellow eye, pinning back darkness… spreading ahead and eating up blackness.
And all of us sitting by the Billpen house waiting, watching, enjoying… first the thunder… then the light in the night… to be followed by a row of portholes glowing in the side of a great rushing worm. Then the great eye would pick out the silver ribbons of rails, the bone-white dead trees on the hill above. Then the Big Express would come, hammering steel on steel, the bong bong of good, heavy steel being wheeled and ridden on. Then the Big Express would gather itself and pull itself forward in space and pass us, rushing madly on into the black blanket ahead, knowing the line was direct, with no crossing over the elevated right-of-way that ran through the town. Then it was gone… two red and green eyes winking at us, the smell of coal smoke, the heat of oiled iron and the polish of Pullman cars… and it was over. It was a grand sight, Mr. Billpen said, it was better than seeing a million dollars… Mrs. Billpen said he never saw a million dollars and never would, and Mr. Billpen nodded and said maybe not, but he'd take the Big Express going past. And then the kids would be sent to bed, and I would walk home by the pike, dreaming I was driving the Big Express at a hundred miles an hour, and nothing could stop it!
One night something did.
Six freight cars of stoves had been loaded on the spur above the main lines and left there till morning, when a freight would come past that they could join. It was down grade to the main line, and someone had been careless… there were no blocks under the wheels of the stove cars and the brakes had been wound up, but not tight… and suddenly the six heavy freight cars began to move…. coal stoves were solid cast iron and heavy… and then the six cars gained speed and came roaring down on the main lines… ignoring the closed switch… ignoring the danger they could make by spilling across the four heavy rail lines that the fast trains used…
Mr. Billpen was reading late… a mail order catalog, a first edition no one could read until he had finished it… when he heard, in his own words, “the sky come down.” There was a scream of tormented iron, angry steel, the grind of earth being pulled up, the clatter of force and brute power; and when he got up and went to the door, he saw six heavy shapes spilling cast-iron stoves across the right-of-way, and the main lines covered with uprooted freight cars, and the rails bent, the heavy steel rails bent like Mrs. Billpen's hairpins…
Then Mr. Billpen shivered, and he had reason to, for far down the line the Big Express whistled, and the great orange eye began to glow over the rim of the earth. Going sixty miles an hour, the train would never stop in time… not by the time the great eye picked up the twisted wrecks of the stove cars and the rails that were no longer in place…
Mr. Billpen tucked in his shirt tail… he always took it out to read—it helped him spell out the big words… and he ran against the great wire fence and saw there was no hope of getting on the line and warning the Big Express.
Mr. Billpen was always a man of action and a man of simple, honest emotions. He saw he had to stop the train, and he did it quickly. It was a wonderful thing he did. He went into the little house, howled the kids and Mrs. Billpen out of their beds, took the oil lamp out of its socket, pulled off the hot glass shade, ran out and set fire to his house, set the naked, leaping flame of the oil lamp to his straw roof in a dozen places.
In twenty seconds it was leaping high, and when the train was three miles away, the house was a heavy torch, turning red, angry, hissing fists to the sky. The Billpens stood there watching their house burn, and the babies yawned or wept, and the older Billpens got into their pants or skirts; and when the train was a mile-and-a-half away, the house was burning like a ship at sea and the surroundings were bright as day, and the names and numbers on the stove cars could be read without glasses at twenty feet. The Big Express saw the horizon burning, saw the dark shapes across the right of way, saw the twisted rails turn to silver in the light of the burning house, and the Big Express shook as the air brakes gripped, shook as it skidded and moaned in rage to be stopped so suddenly in the middle of its run, and the locked driving wheels gave off sparks and the speed seemed never to lose any of its drive… but the great, panting engine, the long glowing tail of the train stopped moving, shook, and stopped twenty-two feet from the first little hill of scattered cast-iron stoves. Men dropped from the Big Express to see this thing that had almost killed them… and Mr. Billpen looked at his house, the rafters, like the ribs of a slaughtered animal, falling away, stopping in their job of giving shape and form to a thing.
The railroad would never have to move Mr. Billpen's house now.
Two weeks later Mr. Billpen was busy on an old coal barge half dragged up on the river bank. It had been there for years, but was solid and could be pumped out, and Mr. Billpen was building his house on it. He had the walls up and was working on the roof when I came up and admired it. It was a wonderful idea. He stopped hammering and looked down at me and invited me to come on up. I climbed up, and he pointed to the roof. It was covered with heavy beer signs… sheet-iron signs that once were hammered on to poles to advertise malt drinks. Mr. Billpen smiled. “Well, this time I'm sure the flood can't wash me out… not on this barge—she'd stand up against icebergs. And this roof can't burn, no matter how I try and set it on fire…” And he winked at me and went back to hammering beer signs together with broad, heavy nails.
And that was the last time he ever mentioned how the Big Express was saved. He didn't even mention it when the railroad sent him a letter saying he had better remove the burned timbers from their land.