Vandemarks Folly | Page 5

sure my growth
was stunted by it--I never grew above five feet seven, though my

mother was a good-sized woman, and she told me that my father was
six feet tall--and my children are all tall. Maybe I should never have
been tall anyhow, as the Dutch are usually broad rather than long. Of
course this life was hard. I was very little when I began watching
machines and tending spindles, and used to cry sometimes because I
was so tired. I almost forgot what it was to play; and when I got home
at night I staggered with sleepiness.
My mother used to undress me and put me to bed, when she was not
pressed with her own work; and even then she used to come and kiss
me and see that I had not kicked the quilt off before she lay down for
her short sleep. I remember once or twice waking up and feeling her
tears on my face, while she whispered "My poor baby!" or other loving
and motherly words over me. When John Rucker went off on his
peddling trips she would take me out of the factory for a few days and
send me to school. The teachers understood the case, and did all they
could to help me in spite of my irregular attendance; so that I learned to
read after a fashion, and as for arithmetic, I seemed to understand that
naturally. I was a poor writer, though; and until I was grown I never
could actually write much more than my name. I could always make a
stagger at a letter when I had to by printing with a pen or pencil, and
when I did not see my mother all day on account of her work and mine,
I used to print out a letter sometimes and leave it in a hollow apple-tree
which stood before the house. We called this our post-office. I am not
complaining, though, of my lack of education. I have had a right good
chance in life, and have no reason to complain--except that I wish I
could have had a little more time to play and to be with my mother. It
was she, though, that had the hard time.
By this time I had begun to understand why John Rucker was always so
cross and cruel to my mother. He was disappointed because he had
supposed when he married her that she had property. My father had
died while a lawsuit for the purpose of settling his father's estate was
pending, and Rucker had thought, and so had my mother, that this
lawsuit would soon be ended, and that she would have the property, his
share of which had been left to her by my father's will. I have never
known why the law stood in my mother's way, or why it was at last that

Rucker gave up all hope and vented his spite on my mother and on me.
I do not blame him for feeling put out, for property is property after all,
but to abuse me and my mother shows what a bad man he was.
Sometimes he used to call me a damned little beggar. The first time he
did that my mother looked at him with a kind of lost look as if all the
happiness in life were gone. After that, even when a letter came from
the lawyers who were looking after the case, holding out hope, and
always asking for money, and Rucker for a day or so was quite chipper
and affectionate to my mother in a sickening sort of sneaking way, her
spirits never rose so far as I could see. I suppose she was what might be
called a broken-hearted woman.
This went on until I was thirteen years old. I was little and not very
strong, and had a cough, caused, perhaps, by the hard steady work, and
the lint in the air of the factory. There were a good many cases every
year of the working people there going into declines and dying of
consumption; so my mother had taken me out of the factory every time
Rucker went away, and tried to make me play. It was so in all the
factories in those days, I guess. I did not feel like playing, and had no
playmates; but I used to go down by the canal and watch the boats go
back and forth. Sometimes the captains of the boats would ask me if I
didn't want a job driving; but I scarcely knew what they meant. I must
have been a very backward child, and I surely was a scared and
conquered one. I used to sit on a stump by the tow-path, and so close to
it that