Father rode on top of the wagon.He was then a bald-headed man of forty-five,a little fat,and from long association with mother and the chickens he had become habitually silent and discouraged.All during our ten years on the chicken farm he had worked as a laborer on neighboring farms and most of the money he had earned had been spent for remedies to cure chicken diseases,on Wilmer's White Wonder Cholera Cure or Professor Bidlow's Egg Producer or some other preparations that mother found advertised in the poultry papers.There were two little patches of hair on father's head just above his ears.I remember that as a child I used to sit looking at him when he had gone to sleep in a chair before the stove on Sunday afternoons in the winter.I had at that rime already begun to read books and have notions of my own,and the bald path that led over the top of his head was,I fancied,something like a broad road,such a road as Caesar might have made on which to lead his legions out of Rome and into the wonders of an unknown world.The tufts of hair that grew above father's ears were,I thought,like forests.I fell into a half-sleeping,half-waking state and dreamed I was a tiny thing going along the road into a far beautiful place where there were no chicken farms and where life was a happy eggless affair.
One might write a book concerning our flight from the chicken farm into town.Mother and I walked the entire eight miles—she to be sure that nothing fell from the wagon and I to see the wonders of the world.On the seat of the wagon beside father was his greatest treasure.I will tell you of that.
On a chicken farm,where hundreds and even thousands of chickens come out of eggs,surprising things sometimes happen.Grotesques are born out of eggs as out of people.The accident does not often occur—perhaps once in a thousand births.A chicken is,you see,born that has four legs,two pairs of wings,two heads,or what not.The things do not live.They go quickly back to the hand of their maker that has for a moment trembled.The fact that the poor little things could not live was one of the tragedies of life to father.He had some sort of notion that if he could but bring into hen-hood or rooster-hood a five-legged hen or a two-headed rooster his fortune would be made.He dreamed of taking the wonder about to county fairs and of growing rich by exhibiting it to other farmhands.
At any rate he saved all the little monstrous things that had been born on our chicken farm.They were preserved in alcohol and put each in its own glass bottle.These he had carefully put into a box,and on our journey into town it was carried on the wagon seat beside him.He drove the horses with one hand and with the other clung to the box.When we got to our destination,the box was taken down at once and the bottles removed.All during our days as keepers of a restaurant in the town of Bidwell,Ohio,the grotesques in their little glass bottles sat on a shelf back of the counter.Mother sometimes protested,but father was a rock on the subject of his treasure.The grotesques were,he declared,valuable.People,he said,liked to look at strange and wonderful things.
Did I say that we embarked in the restaurant business in the town of Bidwell,Ohio?I exaggerated a little.The town itself lay at the foot of a low hill and on the shore of a small river.The railroad did not run through the town and the station was a mile away to the north at a place called Pickleville.There had been a cider mill and pickle factory at the station,but before the time of our coming they had both gone out of business.In the morning and in the evening busses came down to the station along a road called Turner's Pike from the hotel on the main street of Bidwell.Our going to the out-of-the-way place to embark in the restaurant business was mother's idea.She talked of it for a year and then one day went off and rented an empty store building opposite the railroad station.It was her idea that the restaurant would be profitable.Travelling men,she said,would be always waiting around to take trains out of town and town people would come to the station to await incoming trains.They would come to the restaurant to buy pieces of pie and drink coffee.Now that I am older I know that she had another motive in going.She was ambitious for me.She wanted me to rise in the world,to get into a town school and become a man of the towns.
At Pickleville father and mother worked hard,as they always had done.At first there was the necessity of putting our place into shape to be a restaurant.That took a month.Father built a shelf on which he put tins of vegetables.He painted a sign on which he put his name in large red letters.Below his name was the sharp command—"EAT HERE"—that was so seldom obeyed.A showcase was bought and filled with cigars and tobacco.Mother scrubbed the floor and the walls of the room.I went to school in the town and was glad to be away from the farm,and from the presence of the discouraged,sad-looking chickens.Still I was not very joyous.In the evening I walked home from school along Turner's Pike and remembered the children I had seen playing in the town schoolyard.A troop of little girls had gone hopping about and singing.I tried that.Down along the frozen road I went hopping solemnly on one leg."Hippity Hop to the Barber shop,"I sang shrilly.Then I stopped and looked doubtfully about.I was afraid of being seen in my gay mood.It must have seemed to me that I was doing a thing that should not be done by one who,like myself,had been raised on a chicken farm where death was a daily visitor.
