Classic Poem

He was an out-and-out good-for-nothing,
But Sam Carpenter, the rich lumberman,
Always set great store by him for hunting,
And all the money he had ever earned
Sam gave him for tracking deer with him.
He borrowed and stole and squeezed through the year
Without working a tap; the neighbors helped
His good-natured wife and seven children.
And when snow fell the poormaster would come
And take the children to the county house
Until the warm weather came in the Spring.

Alec had a sort of a house on Kenyon Hill,—
A shack, a lean-to of logs patched together,
Not fit for human beings to live in.
One time his wife was sick and I went there
To carry some food; they were starving.
I counted seventeen holes in the roof
That let in daylight; the rain was dropping
On the floor and running down the timbers.
You might just as well have been in the woods
And better, for a tree would give more shelter.
I sliced bread and tossed it to the children.
They snatched it from me and ran to hide,
Just as young partridges run to cover

When the hen-partridge krakes her note of warning.
They were so wild that if strangers went there
They ran to the woods and hid in gullies,
Disappearing like the elves you read about
In the gnarled roots of the fallen timber
Or in the heaps of brown leaf mould.
They were so tanned, being mostly naked,
You couldn't see them once they entered
A wood-lot.

When Alec brought home a deer
They cooked it out-of-doors in an iron pot
And those children danced around the kettle
Like young cannibals waiting for missionary.
Alec would throw marrow bones out to them
And they would sit down and gnaw. That's the way
They lived,—and he had forty acres of land
That he was too lazy to cultivate.
Sometimes the neighbors would give him fresh seed
And make a “bee” for planting and hoeing,
But after they did all that work for him,
He would let the potatoes freeze in the ground
And never cut his corn nor husk it,
And winter would come on while he hunted
For city folks. His wife didn't complain;
She was used to her life and 'most likely
Knew he would never change, so she bore it
And got along somehow through each winter;
And even if she did come out spring-poor
She seemed to love that good-for-nothing man.

One day Sam Carpenter died; 'twas a “shock.”
And it turned out that he had asked
Alec Hill to be a “bearer” in case he died;
And Mis' Carpenter said what Sam wanted
He should have. So we sent to get Alec.
He came, long-haired, barefooted, hatless,
One suspender over an old blue shirt
Above a pair of what once had been trousers.
We saw we could never have the disgrace
Of seeing a man like that at a funeral.
I lent him a white shirt and a collar,
And Rube Tripp let him have a tie and socks;
Granny Braley went up in her garret
And found Grandsire Braley's old wedding suit;
Jim Mosher gave him a good, black felt hat,
And Mis' Carpenter let him have Sam's black shoes.
We cut his hair and sent him to the creek
With a cake of soap. He came back faded
Some, but clean and fresh looking.
Then we helped him into the clothes
And stood back admiring our handiwork.
He was a handsome figure of a man
Even in misfits and borrowed toggings.
Well, Alec was a “bearer” and sat with us.
For one day he was one of us, a neighbor,—
Not the slinking, shiftless vagabond
We had cast out from the community
And promised a coat of tar and feathers
If he didn't mend his ways in the future.

Afterwards, he stripped himself of his plumage
And put on the old patched rags again
And went off up the road sort of dazed looking.
We couldn't believe what we heard the next day,—
That Alec Hill had gone down to The Corners
And hired out to team it for the pulp mill.
We said he wouldn't stay, but he drove team
All Summer and earned ten dollars a week.
The first thing he did was to buy a suit
Of black broadcloth all bound around with braid
Like the old one he'd worn at the funeral,
And all the fixings—hat, shoes, necktie, socks.
Then, come Spring, he clothed up his family
And built over his house and put floors in.
And that year he raised enough potatoes
To feed the children all through the winter.

We didn't have much faith in his reforming,
But he hung on, and moved down to The Corners,
Traded his farm land for a place down there,
So he could send those children to school.
You'll see Alec at church every Sunday.
Summer and Winter he wears that black broad-cloth.
He seems afraid ever to leave it off
For fear the spell would vanish, and he'd go back
To his old, lazy, shiftless ways of living.

Respectability's half in its trappings.
Maybe if I had always worn old rags
And never had shoes to put my feet in
I might have been just the same as he was—
A shiftless, out-and-out good-for-nothing.”