I remember Father tearing the sleeve off my shirt and tying the scrap of cloth tightly around my arm above the elbow to stop the bleeding, talking calmly all the while to the other boys, saying to them that, because they were my elders, he held them responsible for this injury, and they were only making it worse for themselves by lying about it now. He instructed Jason to bring him some kindling sticks for a splint from the woodbox inside and a sheet from one of the beds, and then he grasped my broken arm with both his powerful hands, and when he wrenched the bones back into alignment, the pain was too much for me to bear, and I lost consciousness.
I am recalling this event now with difficulty and almost as if it happened to another person, for it was so many years ago, and the crippled arm of the man I later became completely displaced the pain endured by the nine-year-old boy I was then. My arm did not heal straight and remained locked in a bent position, as you may have observed when we met, and all my life my left hand has worked more like a clever claw than as a proper match to its twin. It was indeed, just as Father said, my punishment. It was a permanent mark, an emblem, placed upon my body like the mark of Cain, which all could see and I myself would never be able to forget. So that, all my life, every time I reached out with both arms to pick up a lamb or shear a sheep, every time I laid a book on my lap and opened it, every time I sat down to eat or prepared to dress myself or tie my shoes or undertook some simple household task, I would remember not the pain of my fall and the long recovery and healing afterwards, but the fact of my having disobeyed and deceived Father.
It was the last time any of us sneaked out of the house on the Sabbath, although I suspect that years later, when the event had faded into family lore, some of the younger children, Salmon, Watson, and Oliver, took their Sabbath-day turn at chancing Father’s wrath. We never spoke of it, but no doubt John and Jason were chastized severely with Father’s leather strip. Although nearly as tall as Father, especially John, who turned thirteen that year, they were boys still and slender, and Father had no compunctions then about laying on the rod. I do know that for many weeks, while I carried my arm like a dead thing in a sling, they were made to do my chores, and long years later, whenever we worked alongside one another, they were still somewhat solicitous of me, as if they had retained a measure of guilt for my being crippled. I, of course, as I have done here, blamed only myself.
That was in New Richmond, but today I am reminded of an episode from those days in Hudson, Ohio, before we went to the Pennsylvania settlement. It was one of the few occasions when we boys managed to get the best of Father. John, Jason, and I stole some early cherries from the orchard of our Uncle Frederick, who lived nearby. It was done at John’s instigation, of course — Jason, even as a boy, was unnaturally scrupulous about such things, and I, who was then about seven (Mother was still alive, I remember that, so I must have been seven), was always the follower of my elder brothers. One of the hired girls who lived and worked at Uncle Frederick’s saw us stealing the cherries and reported it to her older sister, and together they marched straight to their employer and told him of our crime, exaggerating by tenfold the small quantity of cherries we had made off with.
After Uncle Frederick had taken the girls’ information to Father, we received from Father a quick licking, which was appropriately perfunctory, considering the smallness of our crime, but it left us, especially John, feeling vengeful against the hired girls, whose names were Sally and Annie Mulcahy, poor, orphaned Irish girls brought out west from the city of Pittsburgh. They were near our age, and I suppose we believed that they had betrayed us to the adults out of no more decent impulse than to advantage themselves at our expense.
Within hours of our licking, John had filched from the barn a small tin of cow-itch. You, a city woman, may never have heard of it, but “cow-itch” is the common name for a salve infused with the hairs of the cowhage plant, which hairs, applied to human skin, burrow into the skin at once, causing great pain for a long time, as if barbed needles had been thrust into the sufferer’s nerves. It is excruciatingly painful against human skin and sears it for hours afterwards and cannot be washed or wiped off. We used it as a vermifuge against certain diseases of the skin of cattle and sheep. Father always kept a supply with him, for even when he traveled, he brought along a medicine kit for animals; if not for his own livestock, then for demonstration purposes, as Father was forever educating the farmers and cattlemen and sheepmen he met along the way.
That evening after supper, we sneaked over to Uncle Frederick’s house and smeared the stuff liberally over the seats of the outhouse, which we knew was used strictly by the Mulcahy girls. They lived in an attic above the kitchen wing and had a separate entrance and staircase to their quarters. We had often noticed them coming and going early and late, and we knew that they usually visited the outhouse together, especially after dark. In fact, their practice, strange to us, had become something of a joke to Uncle Frederick and the rest of the family (not to Father, naturally, nor to Mother, both of whom disapproved of coarse humor). But Uncle Frederick liked to say that Sally Mulcahy couldn’t do her business without Sister Annie along, and Annie couldn’t do hers without Sister Sally. So far from home and living on the frontier among strangers, the girls were, of course, merely afraid and naturally shy.
None of that mattered to us, however. When we had finished our devious work, we hid in the bushes near the outhouse and waited for the results. Shortly before dark, the two girls came tripping down the outside stairs from their attic, crossed the back yard to the outhouse, and went inside. In less than a minute, one of the girls began to shriek. Then the other. “Something’s bit me! Ow-w-w! Something’s bit me!” cried Annie. “I’m afire!” her sister answered. “Me bottom’s afire! Ow-w-w!” We, of course, thought the whole thing hilarious and could barely keep still or silent, while the girls howled in terrible pain. They ran from the outhouse, their skirts up and knickers down and their bright red fannies aflame. Laughing and clapping one another on the back, we three bad boys crept off through the underbrush to home, properly avenged.
It did not take long, however, for Uncle Frederick and Aunt Martha to conclude that their Irish girls had been victimized by none other than the Brown boys, who, in their view, were allowed by Father to run wild as Indians anyhow. Frederick, who was Father’s younger brother and a deacon in the Congregational Church, was a shopkeeper in the town of Hudson. He was less rural and pious than Father, less withdrawn from the larger community, and despite his sometimes bawdy humor, he was a stern, demanding man. He and his wife, Martha, were childless and perhaps envied Father’s much admired fruitfulness and thus thought him not as properly rigorous a parent as they themselves would have been, had the Lord blessed them in a similar way.
When Martha and Frederick brought their accusations of our “vicious, bad behavior” to Father, he agreed to punish us severely, but only if we were proven guilty by objective evidence or confession. To his credit, Father never simply sided with adults against children. And there being no objective evidence, no eye-witnesses, he needed a confession. Thus we were interrogated by him for several long hours that night. But we did not crack. We simply denied that we had been over at Uncle Frederick’s house and claimed that we’d been hunting up a lost lamb at the time of the incident, and no amount of verbal rebuke or recrimination from Father made us back down. Secretly, we believed that we had been in the right and our lie was justifiable. Our earlier punishment for stealing the cherries had not fit the crime. Finally, Father seemed to give up and told us that we’d have to sleep in the haymow in the barn tonight. Not as punishment, he said, but as an opportunity to discuss amongst ourselves the wrongfulness of our act and the nasty work we were doing to our souls by refusing to confess it.