Vandemark\'s Folly by Herbert Quick

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[Illustration: "I must think!" I said. "Let me be!"]

VANDEMARK'S FOLLY

BY HERBERT QUICK

1922

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I A Flat Dutch Turnip Begins Its Career.
II I Learn and Do Some Teaching.
III I See the World, and Suffer a Great Loss.
IV I Become a Sailor, and Find a Clue.
V The End of a Long Quest.
VI I Become Cow Vandemark.
VII Adventure on the Old Ridge Road.
VIII My Load Receives an Embarrassing Addition.
IX The Grove of Destiny.
X The Grove of Destiny Does Its Work.
XI In Defense of the Proprieties.
XII Hell Slew, Alias Vandemark's Folly.
XIII The Plow Weds the Sod.
XIV I Become a Bandit and a Terror.
XV I Save a Treasure, and Start a Feud.
XVI The Fewkeses in Clover at Blue-grass Manor.
XVII I Receive a Proposal--and Accept.
XVIII Rowena's Way Out--The Prairie Fire.
XIX Gowdy Acknowledges His Son.
XX Just as Grandma Thorndyke Expected.

INTRODUCTION

The work of writing the history of this township--I mean Vandemark
Township, Monterey County, State of Iowa--has been turned over to me. I
have been asked to do this I guess because I was the first settler in
the township; it was named after me; I live on my own farm--the oldest
farm operated by the original settler in this part of the country; I
know the history of these thirty-six square miles of land and also of
the wonderful swarming of peoples which made the prairies over; and the
agent of the Excelsior County History Company of Chicago, having heard
of me as an authority on local history, has asked me to write this part
of their new History of Monterey County for which they are now
canvassing for subscribers. I can never write this as it ought to be
written, and for an old farmer with no learning to try to do it may seem
impudent, but some time a great genius may come up who will put on paper
the strange and splendid story of Iowa, of Monterey County, and of
Vandemark Township; and when he does write this, the greatest history
ever written, he may find such adventures as mine of some use to him.
Those who lived this history are already few in number, are fast passing
away and will soon be gone. I lived it, and so did my neighbors and old
companions and friends. So here I begin.

The above was my first introduction to this history; and just here,
after I had written a nice fat pile of manuscript, this work came mighty
close to coming to an end.

I suppose every person is more or less of a fool, but at my age any man
ought to be able to keep himself from being gulled by the traveling
swindlers who go traipsing about the country selling lightning rods,
books, and trying by every means in their power to get the name of
honest and propertied men on the dotted line. Just now I began tearing
up the opening pages of my History of Vandemark Township, and should
have thrown them in the base-burner if it had not been for my
granddaughter, Gertrude.

The agent of the Excelsior County History Company called and asked me
how I was getting along with the history, and when I showed him what I
have written, he changed the subject and began urging me to subscribe
for a lot of copies when it is printed, and especially, to make a
contract for having my picture in it. He tried to charge me two hundred
seventy-five dollars for a steel engraving, and said I could keep the
plate and have others made from it. Then I saw through him. He never
wanted my history of the township. He just wanted to swindle me into
buying a lot of copies to give away, and he wanted most to bamboozle me
into having a picture made, not half so good as I can get for a few
dollars a dozen at any good photographer's, and pay him the price of a
good team of horses for it. He thought he could gull old Jake Vandemark!
If I would pay for it, I could get printed in the book a few of my
remarks on the history of the township, and my
two-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar picture. Others would write about
something else, and get their pictures in. In that way this smooth
scoundrel would make thousands of dollars out of people's vanity--and he
expected me to be one of them! If I can put him in jail I'll do it--or
I would if it were not for posting myself as a fool.

"Look here," I said, after he had told me what a splendid thing it would
be to have my picture in the book so future generations could see what a
big man I was. "Do you want what I know about the history of Vandemark
Township in your book, or are you just out after my money?"

"Well," he said, "if, after you've written twenty or thirty pages, and
haven't got any nearer Vandemark Township than a canal-boat, somewhere
east of Syracuse, New York, in 1850, I'll need some money if I print the
whole story--judging of its length by that. Of course, the publication
of the book must be financed."

"There's the door!" I said, and pointed to it.

He went out like a shot, and Gertrude, who was on the front porch, came
flying in to see what he was running from. I was just opening the stove
door. In fact I had put some scraps of paper in; but there was no fire.

"Why, grandpa," she cried, "what's the matter? What's this manuscript
you're destroying? Tell me about it!"

"Give it to me!" I shouted; but she sat down with it and began reading.
I rushed out, and was gone an hour. When I came back, she had pasted the
pages together, and was still reading them. She came to me and put her
arms about my neck and kissed me; and finally coaxed me into telling her
all about the disgraceful affair.

Well, the result of it all was that she has convinced me of the fact
that I had better go on with the history. She says that these
county-history promoters are all slippery people, but that if I can
finish the history as I have begun, it may be well worth while.

"There are publishers," she said, "who do actually print such things.
Maybe a real publisher will want this. I know a publisher who may be
glad to get it. And, anyhow, it is a shame for all your experiences to
be lost to the world. It's very interesting as far as you've got. Go on
with it; and if no publisher wants to print it now, we'll give the
manuscript to the Public Library in Monterey Centre, and maybe, long
after both of us are dead and gone, some historian will find it and have
it printed. Some time it will be found precious. Write it, grandpa, for
my sake! We can make a wonderful story of it."

"We?" I said.

"You, I mean, of course," she replied; "but, if you really want me to do
it, I will type it for you, and maybe do a little editing. Maybe you'll
let me do a little footnote once in a while, so my name will go into it
with yours. I'd be awfully proud, grandpa."

"It'll take a lot of time," I said.

"And you can spare the time as well as not," she answered.

"You all think because I don't go into the field with a team any more,"
I objected, "that I don't amount to anything on the farm; but I tell you
that what I do in the way of chores and planning, practically amounts to
a man's work."

"Of course it does," she admitted, though between you and me it wasn't
so. "But any man can do the chores, and the planning you can do
still--and nobody can write the History of Vandemark Township but
Jacobus Teunis Vandemark. You owe it to the West, and to the world."

So, here I begin the second time. I have been bothered up to now by
feeling that I have not been making much progress; but now there will
be no need for me to skip anything. I begin, just as that canvassing
rascal said, a long way from Vandemark Township, and many years ago in
point of time; but I am afloat with my prow toward the setting sun on
that wonderful ribbon of water which led to the West. I was caught in
the current. Nobody could live along the Erie Canal in those days
without feeling the suck of the forests, and catching a breath now and
then of the prairie winds. So all this really belongs in the history.

J.T. VANDEMARK.

VANDEMARK'S FOLLY

CHAPTER I

A FLAT DUTCH TURNIP BEGINS ITS CAREER

My name is Jacobus Teunis Vandemark. I usually sign J.T. Vandemark; and
up to a few years ago I thought as much as could be that my first name
was Jacob; but my granddaughter Gertrude, who is strong on family
histories, looked up my baptismal record in an old Dutch Reformed church
in Ulster County, New York, came home and began teasing me to change to
Jacobus. At first I would not give up to what I thought just her silly
taste for a name she thought more stylish than plain old Jacob; but she
sent back to New York and got a certified copy of the record. So I had
to knuckle under. Jacobus is in law my name just as much as Teunis, and
both of them, I understand, used to be pretty common names among the
Vandemarks, Brosses, Kuyckendalls, Westfalls and other Dutch families
for generations. It makes very little difference after all, for most of
the neighbors call me Old Jake Vandemark, and some of the very oldest
settlers still call me Cow Vandemark, because I came into the county
driving three or four yoke of cows--which make just as good draught
cattle as oxen, being smarter but not so powerful. This nickname is
gall and wormwood to Gertrude, but I can't quite hold with her whims on
the subject of names. She spells the old surname van der Marck--a little
_v_ and a little _d_ with an _r_ run in, the first two syllables written
like separate words, and then the big _M_ for Mark with a _c_ before the
_k_. But she will know better when she gets older and has more judgment.
Just now she is all worked up over the family history on which she began
laboring when she went east to Vassar and joined the Daughters of the
American Revolution. She has tried to coax me to adopt "van der Marck"
as my signature, but it would not jibe with the name of the township if
I did; and anyhow it would seem like straining a little after style to
change a name that has been a household word hereabouts since there were
any households. The neighbors would never understand it, anyhow; and
would think I felt above them. Nothing loses a man his standing among us
farmers like putting on style.

I was born of Dutch parents in Ulster County, New York, on July 27,
1838. It is the only anniversary I can keep track of, and the only
reason why I remember it is because on that day, except when it came on
a Sunday, I have sown my turnips ever since 1855. Everybody knows the
old rhyme:

"On the twenty-seventh of July
Sow your turnips, wet or dry."

And wet or dry, my parents in Ulster County, long, long ago, sowed their
little red turnip on that date.

I often wonder what sort of dwelling it was, and whether the July heat
was not pretty hard on my poor mother. I think of this every birthday.
I guess a habit of mind has grown up which I shall never break off; the
moment I begin sowing turnips I think of my mother bringing forth her
only child in the heat of dog-days, and of the sweat of suffering on her
forehead as she listened to my first cry. She is more familiar to me,
and really dearer in this imaginary scene than in almost any real memory
I have of her.

I do not remember Ulster County at all. My first memory of my mother is
of a time when we lived in a little town the name and location of which
I forget; but it was by a great river which must have been the Hudson I
guess. She had made me a little cap with a visor and I was very proud of
it and of myself. I picked up a lump of earth in the road and threw it
over a stone fence, covered with vines that were red with autumn
leaves--woodbine or poison-ivy I suppose. I felt very big, and ran on
ahead of my mother until she called to me to stop for fear of my falling
into the water. We had come down to the big river. I could hardly see
the other side of it. The whole scene now grows misty and dim; but I
remember a boat coming to the shore, and out of it stepped John Rucker.

Whether he was then kind or cross to me or to my mother I can not
remember. Probably my mind was too young to notice any difference less
than that between love and cruelty. I know I was happy; and it seems to
me that the chief reason of my joy was the new cap and the fact that my
heart swelled and I was proud of myself. I do not believe that I was
more than three years old. All this may be partly a dream; but I
think not.

John Rucker was no dream. He was my mother's second husband; and by the
time I was five years old, and had begun to go to one little school
after another as we moved about, John Rucker had become the dark cloud
in my life. He paid little attention to me, but I recollect that by the
time we had settled ourselves at Tempe I was afraid of him. Two or three
times he whipped me, but no more severely than was the custom among
parents. Other little boys were whipped just as hard, and still were not
afraid of their fathers. I think now that I was afraid of him because my
mother was. I can not tell how he looked then, except that he was a tall
stooped man with a yellowish beard all over his face and talked in a
sort of whine to others, and in a sharp domineering way to my mother. To
me he scarcely ever spoke at all. At Tempe he had some sort of a shop in
which he put up a dark-colored liquid--a patent medicine--which he sold
by traveling about the country. I remember that he used to complain of
lack of money and of the expense of keeping me; and that my mother made
clothes for people in the village.

Tempe was a little village near the Erie Canal somewhere between Rome
and Syracuse. There was a dam and water-power in Tempe or near there,
which, I think, was the overflow from a reservoir built as a
water-supply for the Erie Canal--but I am not sure. I can not find Tempe
on the map; but many names have been changed since those days. I think
it was farther west than Canastota, but I am not sure--it was a
long time ago.

2

Once, for some reason of his own, and when he had got some money in an
unexpected way, Rucker took my mother and me to Oneida for an outing.
My mother and I camped by the roadside while Rucker went somewhere to a
place where a lot of strangers were starting a colony of Free Lovers.
After he returned he told my mother that we had been invited to join the
colony, and argued that it would be a good thing for us all; but my
mother got very mad at him, and started to walk home leading me by the
hand. She sobbed and cried as we walked along, especially after it grew
late in the afternoon and Rucker had not overtaken us with the horse and
democrat wagon. She seemed insulted, and broken-hearted; and was angry
for the only time I remember. When we at last heard the wagon clattering
along behind us in the woods, we sat down on a big rock by the side of
the road, and Rucker meanly pretended not to see us until he had driven
on almost out of sight. My mother would not let me call out to him; and
I stood shaking my fist at the wagon as it went on past us, and feeling
for the first time that I should like to kill John Rucker. Finally he
stopped and made us follow on until we overtook him, my mother crying
and Rucker sneering at both of us. This must have been when I was nine
or ten years old. The books say that the Oneida Community was
established there in 1847, when I was nine.

Long before this I had been put out by John Rucker to work in a factory
in Tempe. It was a cotton mill run, I think, by the water-power I have
mentioned. We lived in a log house on a side-hill across the road and
above the cotton mill. We had no laws in those days against child labor
or long hours. In the winter I worked by candle-light for two hours
before breakfast. We went to work at five--I did this when I was six
years old--and worked until seven, when we had half an hour for
breakfast. As I lived farther from the mill than most of the children
who were enslaved there, my breakfast-time was very short. At half past
seven we began again and worked until noon, when we had an hour for
dinner. At one o'clock we took up work once more and quit at half past
five for supper. At six we began our last trick and worked until
eight--thirteen hours of actual labor.

I began this so young and did so much of it that I feel 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
the boys driving the mules or horses drawing the boats could almost
strike me with their whips, which they often tried to do as they went
by. Then I would scuttle back into the brush and hide. There was a lock
just below, but I seldom went to it because all the drivers were egged
on to fight each other during the delay at the locks, and the canallers
would have been sure to set them on me for the fun of seeing a fight.

On the most eventful evening of my life, perhaps. I sat on this stump,
watching a boat which, after passing me, was slowing down and stopping.
I heard the captain swearing at some one, and saw him come ashore and
start back along the tow-path toward me as if looking for something. He
was a tall man whom I had seen pass at other times, and I was wondering
whether he would speak to me or not, when I felt somebody's hand snatch
at my collar, and a whip came down over my thin shirt with a cut which
as I write I seem to feel yet. It was John Rucker, coming home when we
were not expecting him, and mad at finding me out of the factory.

"I'll learn yeh to steal my time!" he was saying. "I'll learn your
mother to lie to me about your workin'. A great lubber like you
traipsin' around idle, and my woman bringin' a doctor's bill on me by
workin' night an' day to make up your wages to me--and lyin' to her
husband! I'll track you by the blood! Take that--and that--and that!"

I had never resisted him: and even now I only tried to wiggle away from
him. He held me with one hand, though; and at every pause in his
scolding he cut me with the whip. Weeks after the welts on my back and
shoulders turned dark along the line of the whip, and greenish at the
edges. I did not cry. I felt numbed with fright and rage. Suddenly,
however, the tall canal-boat captain, coming back along the tow-path,
put in his oar by striking the whip out of John Rucker's hand; and
snatched me away from him.

"I'll have the law on you!" snarled Rucker.

"The devil you will!" said the captain.

"I'll put you through!" screamed Rucker.

The captain eased himself forward by advancing his left foot, and with
his right fist he smashed Rucker somewhere about the face. Rucker went
down, and the captain picked up the whip, and carefully laying Rucker
on his face stripped up his shirt and revenged me, lash for lash; and
counting each cut stopped when he reached ten.

"I guess that's the number," said he, taking a look at my bloody back;
"but for fear of fallin' short, here's another!" And he drew the whip
back, and brought it down with a quick, sharp, terrible whistle that
proved its force. "Now," said he, "you've got somethin' to put me
through fer!"

Then he started back toward the boat, after picking up a clevis which it
seems the driver-boy had dropped. I looked at Rucker a moment wondering
what to do. He was slowly getting on his feet, groaning, bloody of face
and back, miserable and pitiable. But when he saw me his look of hatred
drove out of my mind my first impulse to help him. I turned and ran
after the captain. That worthy never looked at me; but when he reached
the boat he said to some one on board: "Bill, I call you to bear witness
that I refused Bubby here a chance to run away."

"Ay, ay, sir," responded a voice from the boat.

The captain took me gently by the hand and helped me over the gunwale.

"Get out o' here," he shouted, "an' go back to your lovin' father!"

I sought to obey, but he winked at me and motioned me into the little
cabin forward.

"An' now, my buck," said he, "that you've stowed yourself away and got
so far from home that to put you ashore would be to maroon you in the
wilderness, do you want to take a job as driver? That boy I've got lives
in Salina, and we'll take you on if you feel like a life on the ocean
wave. Can you drive?"

"I do' know!" said I.

"Have you ever worked?" he asked.

"I've worked ever since I was six," I answered.

"Would you like to work for me?" said he.

I looked him in the face for a moment, and answered confidently, "Yes."

"It's a whack," said he. "Maybe we'd better doctor that back o' your'n a
little, and git yeh heartened up for duty."

And so, before I knew it, I was whisked off into a new life.

CHAPTER II

I LEARN AND DO SOME TEACHING

I lay in a bunk in one of the two little forward cabins next the stable,
shivering and sobbing, a pitiful picture of misery, I suppose, as any
one ever saw. I began bawling as soon as the captain commenced putting
arnica on my back--partly because it smarted so, and partly because he
was so very gentle about it; although all the time he was swearing at
John Rucker and wishing he had skinned him alive, as he pretty nearly
did. To feel a gentle hand on my shredded back, and to be babied a
little bit--these things seemed to break my heart almost, though while
Rucker was flogging me I bore it without a cry or a tear. The captain
dressed my back, and said, "There, there, Bubby!" and went away,
leaving me alone.

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