This was a ruse. The haymow, where we sometimes slept by choice on hot summer nights or for occasional mild punishment on cold nights, had a scuttle that led directly to the cattle stanchions below. We knew from past experience that a person could stand below the scuttle and hear every whispered word above: we had stood there ourselves and overheard conversations above that were presumed to be private, and Father had done it to us as well, repeating our overheard words back to us later as a joke.
We vowed, therefore, to be silent, and no sooner had we settled ourselves for sleep in the haymow than we heard the barn door below creak open and a few seconds later heard Father’s breathing and now and then heard him shifting his weight at the lower end of the scuttle. For a long time, we listened to him, alert as deer. Suddenly, John got up from the hay where we lay and loudly announced, “I’ll tell you, boys, if someone’s standing down there at the bottom of the scuttle, he’s going to get clubbed with this!” Whereupon, in a fury, he picked up a large chunk of wood, a heavy piece of a joist four or five feet long, and strode to the scuttle and without hesitation simply tossed it down the chute.
It was a startling thing to do! If it had hit Father, it might have killed him. But the Old Man must have jumped aside at the last second, for we heard the timber bang resoundingly against the floor below and, an instant later, heard the barn door open and then close, as Father tiptoed away. I remember lying up there in the hay for a long time afterwards, shaking with fear and biting off a sudden, inexplicable impulse to laugh aloud.
John was altogether silent and lay a ways apart from me and Jason, and, when Jason said, “What if you had hit him?” did not answer. Turning to me, Jason said, “You know, we’re lucky it didn’t hit him,” and to my astonishment I found myself laughing loudly, wildly, almost crying. I rolled back in the hay and turned myself over and around, squirming like a snake, all the while laughing hilariously, as if a great joke had just been told me. And when at last the laughter stopped, and I lay still, I realized that I had wet myself. My trousers were soaked. Ashamed and miserable then, I crawled as far from my brothers in the haymow as I could get and curled up like a little animal in the far corner and lay awake for most of the rest of the night.
We had defeated Father, yes, indeed, but the event had terrified us. Or at least it had terrified me. As for my brothers, I cannot say. It was one of those things we never spoke about afterwards, even years later, when there was a second humorous event involving cow-itch, which with surprising pointedness, involved Father as well.
I wonder if I should tell it here, for it seems, except in my memory of the event, unrelated. Yet there is no more compelling principle of organization in this long telling than that of memory, and no other principle of selection than that of revealing to you what you cannot otherwise know. So, yes, I’ll tell it here, and you can decide for yourself if you can take from it further understanding of my father and of me.
One night many years later than the event described above, when we were living in Springfield — in the fall of ’47, it must have been, the year before Father made his first journey to North Elba — after several nights of listening to John preach the virtues of some of the newer sciences and health therapies, such as phrenology and Mesmerism, which he was then studying in a mail-order course from New York City, Father, who had been airily dismissive of all such notions, agreed to attend a demonstration by a well-known hypnotist, a Professor La Roy Sunderland. Coming from Father, this was a considerable and unexpected concession, and John was delighted by it.
Together, the three of us, Father, John, and I, marched off immediately after supper to the Palace Theater, where we took our seats as near to the front as possible. The Professor was an imposing figure of a man, with a flowing blond beard and a scarlet face and a grand, oratorical voice and manner. Most if not all of the people in the audience that night were true believers in the powers of hypnotism, so the Professor had the pleasure of speaking to the already converted, and his demonstration was laced with sarcastic, condescending references to those ignorant folks who, like Father, “preferred superstition to science.” This did not sit well with Father, naturally, and he squirmed and muttered throughout, as the florid Professor, with charts of the brain and diagrams of nervous impulses and connectors, explained how hypnotism successfully blocked off pain and could be used wonderfully, if only people were sufficiently enlightened, in surgery and in the treatment of fractures and injuries.
He had many anecdotes to bolster his reasoning, and after a while, when he felt that his audience had been adequately instructed and prepared, he called for some volunteers, so as to demonstrate before our very eyes the power of this marvelous new science. Immediately, a half-dozen men and women, mostly young, left their seats in various sections of the auditorium and made their way to the stage.
“The man’s a charlatan,” Father grumbled in a low voice. “His ‘volunteers’ are no more genuine than play-actors.”
“So why don’t you volunteer, Father?” John suggested.
“I think I’ll enjoy the show more from here, thank you.”
“What about you, Owen?” John said.
“No,” I said. “I’ll just watch, and make up my mind later.” I was shy about being seen up on a stage like that. Because of my arm, perhaps, but mainly because of an innate desire to blend in with the crowd and not seem showy or self-advertising. Besides, I did not particularly want to play a role in this ongoing quarrel between John and Father. It was their fight, not mine. For some years now, John had seemed intent on converting Father to his belief in “science” and “objectivity!” which Father well knew was merely a covert way of arguing with him about the truth of the Bible and religion. I had long since decided to keep my apostasy as private as possible and never tried to defend it against Father’s faith.
From his group of volunteers, Professor Sunderland selected the most attractive person, a buxom, fair-skinned young woman with brown hair wound neatly around her head, and drew her to the center of the stage. He asked her if she had ever been hypnotized before. She responded in the negative, and he said, “Excellent, excellent,” and invited her to sit down on a stool that his assistant had placed there. When she was seated, he proceeded to wave his fingers lightly before her face and then asked her to count aloud backwards from ten. Before she reached five, she had ceased counting altogether and was gazing insensibly out at the audience.
“This lovely young lady,”the Professor announced, “has not left us. She hears and understands my every word. She has, however, been rendered insensible to pain.”
“Nonsense,”‘ Father muttered.
The Professor informed the young woman that she would not remember any of what was about to occur, that he would do nothing to harm her or anyone else, and he would not ask her to do or say anything that was morally repugnant to her. She gave no indication that she had heard or understood him but merely sat there on the stool with a small smile on her lips, as if she were remembering a pleasant incident from earlier in the day. She seemed quite peaceful and at rest.
At a gesture from the Professor, his assistant suddenly appeared beside him with a lit candle. “Extend your left hand, palm to the floor, please,” the hypnotist said, and the woman instantly complied. When he brought the flame of the candle to within an inch of her palm, she showed no evidence of having felt its heat. For a long time, he held it there, before taking it away and handing it back to his assistant, retrieving this time a bit of ice. He told the woman to turn her hand over, which she did, and he placed the ice into her hand and closed her fingers over it. Her pleasantly calm expression and relaxed physical manner did not change; the cold bothered her no more than had the heat.