Now, though he no longer owed five thousand dollars to his old friend Amos Chamberlain, he owed it instead to Wadsworth & Wells, who, with some justification, felt that while they may not have been exactly robbed of it, neither had they willingly loaned it. At that awful moment of his discovery, seated before his stern, skeptical discoverers, the Old Man had no choice but to comply with their demand that he sign over to them, contingent upon his return of their five thousand dollars, the one remaining property in his name, his beloved Haymaker Place, which sheltered his wife and children.
Meanwhile, the expected money from the mystery loaner in Boston did not materialize. I suspect that it had never been more than a mild promise merely to consider his request, but the Old Man, when he wanted, could make a polite rejection seem its opposite. They waited a week more, and finally Mr. Wadsworth declared that he and Mr. Wells would hold whatever monies they got for selling the herd of cattle against his eventual repayment of the money he owed them or until the sale of the Haymaker property. They had no way of knowing the true value of the farm, of course, or whether it had any prior liens on it, so they simply used the cattle as collateral. And they told him that, regretfully, they would no longer be able to rely on him as their western agent.
At that point, Father had no choice but to leave Hartford and make his somber way homeward. Thus he returned to us a humiliated man and poorer by far than when he had left to put his affairs at last in good order. Poorer, more desperate, and deeper in debt than ever, this time to men who, unlike Mr. Chamberlain, unlike Grandfather and our other relatives, friends, and neighbors back in Ohio, had no particular interest in protecting John Brown and his family. There was nothing for it then but a steady worsening of his affairs. Like Napoleon in Russia, he had advanced too far beyond his meager resources, so that he could no longer retreat back to a safe base, there to wait out the winter storms. Instead, he would have to slog and thrash his way forward, a blind man in a blizzard. And so he did for the rest of his life, dragging us along behind.
Back in Hudson, like a man switching a single pea beneath three shells, the Old Man managed to forestall disaster and hold on to the Haymaker Place a while longer, until the following year, the summer of ’40. After much legal wrangling and suits and counter-suits leading all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court, a final judgement had been found. Bankruptcy was unavoidable. This time, all Father’s debts were being called in, and his beloved old Haymaker Place had at last to be abandoned.
To his further horror, the original lien against the place had been called in by the bank and sold at auction, with Mr. Amos Chamberlain the eventual buyer, and the proceeds from the sale, once Father’s loans from the bank were covered, were to be paid against the sum owed Wadsworth & Wells. Mr. Chamberlain, in what Father saw as an unforgiveable betrayal, had managed to find the cash to offer the bank eight thousand five hundred dollars for the place. “If the man had that sort of money’ Father fumed, “he might’ve loaned it to me and let me keep the farm, so that I might feed my family!”
Blinded by his anger, Father was unable to accept the reality of the situation. He refused to turn the farm over to Mr. Chamberlain, and as a consequence, one warm day the county sheriff and his deputies came out to the farm to put us off it. The Old Man viewed the Haymaker Place as his last stand. “I need this farm! I must hold it and work here, if I’m ever going to provide my creditors with their just due,” he insisted. In recent months, he had abandoned all vain fantasies of spinning gold from straw and had wisely resumed tanning hides on the property, his most reliable means of support over the years, where his labor and skills and those of his sons were sufficient to turn a small profit. Thus he had come to imagine for the first time in years a realistic way of slowly working himself out of debt, one hard-earned dollar at a time. But he needed the house and its outbuildings and the stands of shagbark hickory that surrounded the farm in order to accomplish it.
The prospect of losing the place put him into a mindless frenzy. “Boys, we will fight them to the death! A man must defend his property!” he declared to us that June morning. “It’s an old story. If it can be made merely to appear that Naboth the Jezreelite has blasphemed God and the King, then it will be perfectly right and good for Ahab to possess his vineyard! So reasoned wicked men against Naboth thousands of years ago, boys, and so they reason against me today!”
We were all at midday dinner in the house, Oliver but a baby then, the kitchen full of babies, it seemed — Charles, who would die in the terrible winter of ’43, and Salmon and Watson, and little Sarah, who was six and who would also die in that winter of ’43. Fred, then a sweetly meditative child with none of his later turbulence, was nine; Ruth was but eleven and already performing the labors of a grown woman; and there was I, at sixteen, like a large, housebound dog, simple-mindedly excited by the loud, rough noise of Father’s voice; and Jason, two years older, silently observing, placid, skeptical but loyal; and John, the eldest, eager to display his superior understanding of the situation and his willingness to stand fast with the Old Man.
Father’s voice cracked and split in the fire of his feelings. “I warned them, I told them this morning at the bank, warned them straight out. I told them that I would shoot down their agents, if they came to take my home and land from me, and I swear, that’s exactly what I will do! I wanted peace, but this.. this Ahab” he spat, “will not let me have it!”
Mary — I think of her now, but I did not think of her then — poor, distressed Mary, with all her small children to tend to, while her husband raged and his elder sons urged him on, must have desired then, as so many times before and later, all the way to the terrifying end days in Virginia, just to be rid of men altogether. She knew better than any of us that there was no way for our family to survive these difficult times except by means of patient, quiet application of our daily labors, and while the Old Man appeared often to agree, when he became frustrated or frightened he could not keep his anger or his fantasies leashed. And we older boys took our lessons from him.
Father loaded his musket and instructed John, Jason, and me to do the same. Then we four marched from the house down to the town road, where there was at the edge of the property an old, low log cabin built by the original Haymaker, which we used now as a storage shed for hickory bark and lumber. “Here we shall make our stand,” he pronounced, and commanded us to spend our time fortifying the structure with whatever boards and timbers there were lying around. He had work at the tannery and at the house yet to finish, he said, and would protect the property from there. He ordered us to stay at the cabin night and day. Ruth or he himself would bring us food and fresh clothing. “And if the rascals show their faces, boys, fire once into the air to signal me, and I’ll come a-running. They’ll see then that we are serious about this!” he declared, and he was off, loping back up the slope to the house, leaving us alone in our outpost.
“Well, if the sheriff does show;’ Jason soberly said, “let’s just be damned sure he knows we’re only firing in the air.”
John agreed. “That’s all the Old Man wants anyhow.” His voice had a quaver to it. “He knows that when they see we’re serious about defending our home, they’ll likely back off