He was in those days more frightened than I had ever seen him before or afterwards. The growing violence of his words alarmed all who heard him, especially Mary and us children. The more frantic and frightened he became, the more reliant on his Bible for guidance and on his moral force for instruction he became, but now his discourse was a tangle of contradictory quotations and maxims that even he could not unravel. “This prolonged tribulation, if it be the will of Providence, must be endured with cheerfulness and true resignation,” he instructed us. “We must try to trust in Him who is very gracious and full of compassion and of almighty power, for those that do not will be made ashamed. We must not be ashamed, children! Remember that Ezra, the prophet, when himself and the capitivity were in a strait, prayed and afflicted himself before God. So must we go and do likewise.”
Thus, though we had come to dread the announcement of any new scheme or plan to make money and at last turn things around, it was with barely concealed relief that we greeted his decision to round up a herd of miscellaneous cattle from all over the county and drive it east to Connecticut, where there was a ready, cash-paying market operated by the agency of Wadsworth & Wells, a company that Father had dealt with successfully in the past. In short order, he managed to put together a sizeable herd of cows owned mostly by Grandfather and several of Father’s friends, with seventeen head of our own, all but our last two milch cows. He drove his cattle aboard the barge at Ashtabula, and we waved him off and, when he was out of sight, happily embraced one another, glad to see him gone from us for a while, so that we could re-gather our wits and reclaim a shared sense of reality.
When he went east in ’39, Father’s real plan, which he did not reveal to those who had entrusted him with their cattle, was not merely to raise cash by selling livestock to Wadsworth & Wells, but also while there to negotiate still further loans in New York or, if necessary, up in Boston, to cover his growing losses back in Ohio. It took him only a few days to fail in New York; bankers there had already withdrawn all speculative loans from the Western Reserve and were not about to risk more. Directly, he went on to tap the more deeply rooted money trees in Boston, and when he returned to complete his cattle-dealing in Hartford, although lugging an empty bucket, he was once again brightly optimistic. He never said who, but someone up there had allowed Father to believe that within a few days, a week at the most, of his return to Hartford, he would receive an unsecured loan of five thousand dollars. I suspect his supposed benefactor was a wealthy abolitionist like Mr. Stearns or even Dr. Howe, whose wife, the poet, was rumored to be an heiress, but it might have been a Yankee banker still looking to extract titles to western lands from a bumpkin in need, a rich man only temporarily deluded as to his own best interests by Father’s enthusiasm, naïveté, and evident honesty.
Five thousand dollars. The figure is important. This was the amount for which Father had recently been sued by the Western Reserve Bank of Warren, Ohio, for having defaulted on several loans. Judgement had been found against him, and unable to pay even a portion of the debt, he was being threatened with outright bankruptcy or jail. At the last minute, an old friend from Akron, Mr. Amos Chamberlain, had kindly taken over the note for him. To guarantee that loan, the Old Man had written Mr. Chamberlain a note against the Haymaker farm. What he did not tell Mr. Chamberlain or the Western Reserve Bank was that the Haymaker title had earlier been used to guarantee any number of additional loans of money for the purchase of other large plots of land along the Cuyahoga River. It had been done pursuant to the digging of the proposed Ohio-to-Pittsburgh canal, which, unfortunately, had ended up going in further west, near Cleveland. It was another of his schemes gone bad, still unpaid, and one of the bottom cards in Father’s shaky house of cards.
A few days passed, and no money arrived from Boston. A week. Then another. Every few hours, Father walked from the office of Wadsworth & Wells, which he was using as his headquarters, to the post office, only to return empty-handed, puzzled, increasingly angered, and very frightened. At best, he would lose everything: the farm and livestock, the house and all its furnishings — everything! How would he feed his poor babies? How could he face his family and friends? Then sometime during the afternoon of June 14, 1839, Mr. Wadsworth went into the office of his company and discovered that the sum of five thousand dollars had been removed from the cash box. As the box was undamaged and still locked, he knew at once who had taken it. Besides Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Wells, only Father, their trusted agent, who might now and then need a few dollars in order to help conduct their business, had a key.
I do not know what my father was thinking while he stood that day in the empty office, counting out the money. He could not possibly have gotten away with it. And the betrayal! He was almost a partner, a trusted confidant of Messrs. Wadsworth and Wells, their reliable procurer of western cattle, one of the most knowledgeable and honest stockmen they had ever worked with. He must have felt like a child who has long protected one lie with another and has woven an entire fabric of lies, laying one strand atop and under the other, and has come eventually to long for the truth to stand revealed, not because he loves the truth, but because exposure will bring an end to the agonizing labor of weaving a world of falsehoods. To get it over with, simply to make sense of his daily life, the child finally tells an utterly outrageous lie, one that cannot be believed. With a single lie, he overthrows the entire false world and reinstates the true. The theft from Wadsworth & Wells was like that, for nothing Father could say to explain it would be believed by them, and for a single moment, as he reached into the cash box and counted out the five thousand dollars, Father must have been that child. He closed the box and placed it back inside the cabinet and locked both.
At once, he sent the money off to his friend Mr. Chamberlain in Ohio, who would on receipt of it relinquish back to Father the title of the Haymaker Place. All was well again. Until, of course, later that evening, when Messrs. Wadsworth and Wells both presented themselves at the door of Father’s room at his Lawrence Street boarding house. When they knocked, Father, in what he regarded as a remarkable coincidence, as if the Lord were introducing him back to himself, happened to be reading in his Bible, John, Chapter 10: He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.
Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Wells said that they had come to his chamber, not to accuse Mr. Brown of theft, but simply to ask into his use of the five thousand dollars. They thought that he must have needed it to make a large purchase for them, and they wished to know what it was.
He did not lie; he could not; he told them straight out: he had taken it for his own use. But it was only a temporary removal, he insisted, for he fully expected to receive the same amount in hours or, at the most, days, from a party up in Boston. This was true enough. And had he not at the same time believed that he was owed that much and more by Wadsworth & Wells, he said, money owed for the eventual sale of the cattle he had delivered to them from the west, he would have felt considerable anguish and remorse for having removed the money prematurely. But while he was truly ashamed of having gotten himself into a situation whereby he needed the money desperately and at once, he felt on the other hand no shame for having actually taken the money, no guilt.