Ancestors by William Maxwell Read Free Book Online

years before he took up the practice of law. My guess is that he was handed over to a farmer and worked for his keep from the time he was five years old, and the farmer got all the work out of him he possibly could. But my father and my aunts never spoke about it, nor my grandmother—from which I conclude that my grandfather himself never spoke about it, perhaps because he could not bear to speak about it. Or because it was gone, left behind when he left Ohio.
    The history continues: “He mainly supported and educated himself, attending the school of Uhrichsville till seventeen years of age. In 1866 he left Ohio and came to Illinois.”
    The history doesn’t tell how my grandfather got from Ohio to Illinois, but I know, anyway: he bought a pair of shoes and started walking. About six hundred miles. Somewhere between a month and six weeks of steady walking. Ifit was the early part of the summer, as it is only reasonable to suppose, he was not seventeen but sixteen. In 1866 there was a railroad that would have taken him where he wanted to go, but walking was cheaper. No details of this journey have survived—only the fact that he made it, the year after the Civil War ended. And so it can be assumed that men in uniform trudged along beside him with their discharge papers in their pockets. For a good part of the journey he must have followed the National Road, which at that time extended from Cumberland, Maryland, to Vandalia, Illinois. The roadbed was thirty feet wide, and the eastern section was paved with an inch of crushed stone and gravel. The western section was not paved with anything. Tree stumps eighteen inches high were left in the road but trimmed and rounded with an axe so that carriages could safely pass over them. The National Road was used by a steady stream of two-wheeled carts, Conestoga wagons, farm wagons, men on horseback, men on foot, men driving cattle, hogs, horses, and mules. Now choking on clouds of dust, now with his new shoes caked with mud, my grandfather moved among them.
    When he had the good fortune to arrive at a log cabin or a farmhouse at nightfall, I expect they took him in. But in 1866 the Great Prairie was not densely populated, and so, many times, when evening came there was not a house of any kind in sight, and he went into an oak grove, out of the wind, and made a bed of leaves beside a fallen log. In his knapsack, or if he didn’t have a knapsack then in his coat pocket, he carried a Bible, which I see him reading from as he walks along. It is too late in the day for him to be surprised by hostile Indians in Ohio or Indiana, but he could have been murdered by a white man for whatever was in his pockets. Such crimes were not common but they did occur.
    His first sight of the prairie he must always have remembered. The vast illimitable plain spreading in all directions.Timber and grass, grass higher than his head and undulating in the wind like the long swells of ocean. The Virgilian cloud shadows following one on another. The meeting of earth and sky. The feeling of being exposed. The unreality—for part of what he saw was a mirage and would fade from sight, only to reappear in its actuality half an hour later when he reached the crest of that farther ridge.
    I know what my grandfather looked like at the time of this journey, because I have a tintype of him, given to me by my Aunt Bert. It was taken when he was still a very young man. The face is not that of somebody given to feeling sorry for himself. The photographer is probably responsible for the cheerful, upward tilt of the head, but the set of the narrow jaw is surely his own, and what it suggests is granite. Even so, it’s a long walk from Ohio to Illinois.
    When he had crossed the Indiana line and was about fifteen miles northeast of Springfield, destiny prompted him to stop in a farmyard and ask for a drink of water. The farmer inquired where he was going, and my grandfather explained that he was looking for a job teaching