Читать книгу Life of an American Workman онлайн

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Ellis grew civilized so fast, however, that barbarianism never had a valid claim on me. At first there was no paving whatever; when you stepped off the boardwalk, you were in the mud. Then a bank was organized, and we had a butcher shop where beef was sold. The butcher would give you liver for the asking. First thing we knew, there was a coalyard and a lumberyard. Somebody opened a rival of the first general store, and finally we had a regular post office apart from any store. The streets intruded farther and farther into the prairie. It was about 1889, when I was past fourteen, that my father built a bigger house with two stories. It had a shingled roof, a nice porch, and just above it a dormer window. Around the yard was a wooden picket fence; there were lilac bushes in the corner of the lot and some maples my father planted eventually were big enough to shade our yard.

There was no plumbing in Ellis that anyone could brag about, and it was an event when my father, a progressive citizen, bought a windmill so we could have running water. The next thing was a bathtub, for which he built a special room against the kitchen. He made it himself, by lining a wooden box with sheets of copper, shaping the metal with a steep slope at each end, enclosing this contrivance in a sheath of tongued and grooved boards. When it was painted we had something of which all the neighbors envied us. Until then, our baths were taken in a wooden tub out in the kitchen. At the rear of our yard there was a stable—we had four horses as well as three cows—and a coal shed. It seems to me that the back door of our house was the only one I ever used. The alley was a thoroughfare that led to temporary freedom from the chores I hated. If Ed or I ran away after dark to play with the kids, when we came home we always got a licking, because my mother was unfailingly strict. It was her law that we must not be out after dark. Sometimes we would hop the evening train, riding on the blind baggage thirteen miles to Hays. You could bet, as you approached the house through the back yard, that she would be sitting in the kitchen waiting with that hairbrush, and a hand that would hold you by the neck with a grip like iron. Still, on certain nights, the excitement was worth the fee.