The cottonwood is a tree of a slovenly and
plebeian habit. Its woolly wisps turn gray the lawns and engender
neighborhood hostilities about our town. Yet it is a mighty tree, a
refuge and an inspiration; the sun flickers in its towering
foliage, whence the tattoo of locusts enlivens our dusty summer
afternoons. From the wheat country out to the sagebrush plains
between the buttes and the Yellowstone it is the cottonwood that
keeps a little grateful shade for sweating homesteaders.
In Joralemon we call Knute Axelbrod "Old Cottonwood." As a
matter of fact, the name was derived not so much from the quality
of the man as from the wide grove about his gaunt white house and
red barn. He made a comely row of trees on each side of the country
road, so that a humble, daily sort of a man, driving beneath them
in his lumber wagon, might fancy himself lord of a private avenue.
And at sixty-five Knute was like one of his own
cottonwoods, his roots deep in the soil, his trunk weathered by
rain and blizzard and baking August noons, his crown spread to the
wide horizon of day and the enormous sky of a prairie night.
This immigrant was an American even in speech. Save for a
weakness about his j's and w's, he spoke the twangy Yankee English
of the land. He was the more American because in his native
Scandinavia he had dreamed of America as a land of light. Always
through disillusion and weariness he beheld America as the world's
nursery for justice, for broad, fair towns, and eager talk; and
always he kept a young soul that dared to desire beauty.
As a lad Knute Axelbrod had wished to be a famous scholar,
to learn the ease of foreign tongues, the romance of history, to
unfold in the graciousness of wise books. When he first came to
America he worked in a sawmill all day and studied all evening. He
mastered enough book-learning to teach district school for two
terms; then, when he was only eighteen, a great-hearted pity for
faded little Lena Wesselius moved him to marry her. Gay enough,
doubtless, was their hike by prairie schooner to new farmlands, but
Knute was promptly caught in a net of poverty and family. From
eighteen to fifty-eight he was always snatching children away from
death or the farm away from mortgages.
He had to be content-and generously content he was-with the
second-hand glory of his children's success and, for himself, with
pilfered hours of reading-that reading of big, thick, dismal
volumes of history and economics which the lone mature learner
chooses. Without ever losing his desire for strange cities and the
dignity of towers he stuck to his farm. He acquired a half-section,
free from debt, fertile, well-stocked, adorned with a cement silo,
a chicken-run, a new windmill. He became comfortable, secure, and
then he was ready, it seemed, to die; for at sixty-three his work
was done, and he was unneeded and alone.
His wife was dead. His sons had scattered afar, one a
dentist in Fargo, another a farmer in the Golden Valley. He had
turned over his farm to his daughter and son-inlaw. They had begged
him to live with them, but Knute refused.
"No," he said, "you must learn to stand on your own feet. I
vill not give you the farm. You pay me four hundred dollars a year
rent, and I live on that and vatch you from my hill."
On a rise beside the lone cottonwood which he loved best of
all his trees Knute built a tar-paper shack, and here he "bached
it"; cooked his meals, made his bed, sometimes sat in the sun, read
many books from the Joralemon library, and began to feel that he
was free of the yoke of citizenship which he had borne all his
life.
For hours at a time he sat on a backless kitchen chair
before the shack, a wide-shouldered man, white-bearded, motionless;
a seer despite his grotesquely baggy trousers, his collarless
shirt. He looked across the miles of stubble to the steeple of the
Jackrabbit Forks church and meditated upon the uses of life. At
first he could not break the rigidity of habit. He rose at five,
found work in cleaning his cabin and cultivating his garden, had
dinner exactly at twelve, and went to bed by afterglow. But little
by little he discovered that he could be irregular without being
arrested. He stayed abed till seven or even eight. He got a large,
deliberate, tortoise-shell cat, and played games with it; let it
lap milk upon the table, called it the Princess, and confided to it
that he had a "sneaking idee" that men were fools to work so hard.
Around this coatless old man, his stained waistcoat flapping about
a huge torso, in a shanty of rumpled bed and pine table covered
with sheets of food-daubed newspaper, hovered all the passionate
aspiration of youth and the dreams of ancient beauty. He began to
take long walks by night. In his necessitous life night had ever
been a period of heavy slumber in close rooms. Now he discovered
the mystery of the dark; saw the prairies wide-flung and misty
beneath the moon, heard the voices of grass and cottonwoods and
drowsy birds. He tramped for miles. His boots were dew-soaked, but
he did not heed. He stopped upon hillocks, shyly threw wide his
arms, and stood worshiping the naked, slumbering land.
These excursions he tried to keep secret, but they were
bruited abroad. Neighbors, good, decent fellows with no sense about
walking in the dew at night, when they were returning late from
town, drunk, lashing their horses and flinging whisky bottles from
racing democrat wagons, saw him, and they spread the tidings that
Old Cottonwood was "getting nutty since he give up his farm to that
son-inlaw of his and retired. Seen the old codger wandering around
at midnight. Wish I had his chance to sleep. Wouldn't catch me out
in the night air."
Any rural community from Todd Center to Seringapatam is
resentful of any person who varies from its standard, and is
morbidly fascinated by any hint of madness. The countryside began
to spy on Knute Axelbrod, to ask him questions, and to stare from
the road at his shack. He was sensitively aware of it, and inclined
to be surly to inquisitive acquaintances. Doubtless that was the
beginning of his great pilgrimage.
As a part of the general wild license of his new
life-really, he once roared at that startled cat, the Princess: "By
gollies! I ain't going to brush my teeth tonight. All my life I've
brushed 'em, and alvays wanted to skip a time vunce"-Knute took
considerable pleasure in degenerating in his taste in scholarship.
He wilfully declined to finish The Conquest of Mexico, and began to
read light novels borrowed from the Joralemon library. So he
rediscovered the lands of dancing and light wines, which all his
life he had desired. Some economics and history he did read, but
every evening he would stretch out in his buffalo-horn chair, his
feet on the cot and the Princess in his lap, and invade Zenda or
fall in love with Trilby.
Among the novels he chanced upon a highly optimistic story
of Yale in which a worthy young man "earned his way through"
college, stroked the crew, won Phi Beta Kappa, and had the most
entertaining, yet moral, conversations on or adjacent to "the dear
old fence."
As a result of this chronicle, at about three o'clock one
morning, when Knute Axelbrod was sixty-four years of age, he
decided that he would go to college. All his life he had wanted to.
Why not do it?
When he awoke he was not so sure about it as when he had
gone to sleep. He saw himself as ridiculous, a ponderous, oldish
man among clean-limbed youths, like a dusty cottonwood among silver
birches. But for months he wrestled and played with that idea of a
great pilgrimage to the Mount of Muses; for he really supposed
college to be that sort of place. He believed that all college
students, except for the wealthy idlers, burned to acquire
learning. He pictured Harvard and Yale and Princeton as ancient
groves set with marble temples, before which large groups of
Grecian youths talked gently about astronomy and good government.
In his picture they never cut classes or ate.
With a longing for music and books and graciousness such as
the most ambitious boy could never comprehend, this thick-faced
farmer dedicated himself to beauty, and defied the unconquerable
power of approaching old age. He sent for college catalogues and
school books, and diligently began to prepare himself for college.
He found Latin irregular verbs and the whimsicalities of
algebra fiendish. They had nothing to do with actual life as he had
lived it. But he mastered them; he studied twelve hours a day, as
once he had plodded through eighteen hours a day in the hayfield.
With history and English literature he had comparatively little
trouble; already he knew much of them from his recreative reading.
From German neighbors he had picked up enough Platt-deutsch to make
German easy. The trick of study began to come back to him from his
small school teaching of forty-five years before. He began to
believe that he could really put it through. He kept assuring
himself that in college, with rare and sympathetic instructors to
help him, there would not be this baffling search, this nervous
strain.
But the unreality of the things he studied did disillusion
him, and he tired of his new game. He kept it up chiefly because
all his life he had kept up onerous labor without any taste for it.
Toward the autumn of the second year of his eccentric life he no
longer believed that he would ever go to college.
Then a busy little grocer stopped him on the street in
Joralemon and quizzed him about his studies, to the delight of the
informal club which always loafs at the corner of the hotel.
Knute was silent, but dangerously angry. He remembered just
in time how he had once laid wrathful hands upon a hired man, and
somehow the man's collar bone had been broken. He turned away and
walked home, seven miles, still boiling. He picked up the Princess,
and, with her mewing on his shoulder, tramped out again to enjoy
the sunset.
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