Boys Grown Tall

UNCLES surely are one of the richest by-products of civilization. They have been more important than guilds or charters or colleges, for they have combined in their persons, usually inclining toward the rotund in those of the first water and away from the yoke matrimonial, the virtues of the best colleges and charters and guilds. They have schooled the younglings of the nations with a pedagogy more velvet of touch than that in the schools; they have given their millions of nephews bills of such rights of boyhood as only those who have kept something of the boy in their reins can give; and they have handed on down through the generations the secrets of the craft of making toy boats or whistles or slings, the essentials of the life that shines. Byproducts, though, they are. For not one of the best of them but has been a man who stood aside from those tussling with the wheels of progress turning in the mire. They have made bystanding into one of the arts. Though they have sometimes begotten sons, it was a careless gesture with nothing of the father elect about it. And they have let their sons grow up like tumbleweeds to be the uncles of to-morrow. They have treated them like nephews, and so won their love.

And because uncles have been bystanders, they have always had time. Time for taking a trout in mid-May, and potatoes yearning with brimming eyes for the loam; time for long stories in haying time; time for a boy with eyes as big as saucers and questions to keep a library busy. And it is the men who have time who have seen the idea behind wheels that fly around, behind waves of the sea and the comeliness of trees. Uncles have known all along the principles Democritus was after with laughing, Heraclitus with weeping, and Pythagoras with beans. But, being uncles, they have refused to become philosophers and to codify or pool their wisdom. They have taken it with them into the grave so that there might be a need still of uncles right up to the doorstep of Kingdom Come.

It is a poor boy that has not had a big sheaf of uncles. It would take a large book to catalogue mine. Not one of them was a success, as the world measures a man, by his acres or the dust he kicks up. And most of them had this added virtue, that they stole away early to a perpetual unclehood in the city where uncles outshine the jasper and emerald of the high seats they warm. For it is the golden uncle who slips betimes away, just when his nephews are putting out pinfeathers to attract the girls and ceasing to ask questions because they have so many to answer.

One of my uncles of the first magnitude had the halo of being unseen by me. He had been mislaid on Sherman’s march some thirty years before I was under the sun. But the songs he sang and the kingly things he did I knew better than I knew my multiplication table. I tried feebly to follow him up the trees he shinned and the rivers he swam; but he was always on ahead with longer wings on his head and heels. I knew by heart the land he had gotten away to. Sweet potatoes paved it with amber; Southern porkers fled squealing, with Yankee bayonets stuck up in them, down its vistas; and the mocking bird sang forever in its trees.

Another uncle was this world’s champion as a failure. He started in building wooden ships just when steel ones were coming in. He put his all into a lobster factory just when lobsters were becoming extinct. He invented I know not how many splendid contrivances that had just come upon the market. He succeeded in failing in both directions. He sold his farm just before feldspar was discovered in the ledges on which he had tried to suckle cabbages. And the beauty of it all was that life was all larks to him. If he had once succeeded, it would have broken his heart. Failure kept his hair dark and his step like a panther’s. In success he would have turned tabby and purred stupidly by the fire.

I had an uncle who played on the flageolet, made astonishing jew’s-harps, and let the cows go over and over his red clover while he chased a black duck across innumerable bays. He had a firearm for every occasion of life but that when the hawk carried off his chickens. He neglected his growing pork for a lean buck-deer. His house was full of stuffed game birds; but his pantry was full of empty platters. His entries on his tallies of ducks he had bagged were legion; but his bank book never turned the second leaf. Yet this man for me was Nimrod, Robin Hood, and Daniel Boone all rolled together. He taught me how to shoot just where the woodcock will be when one can pull the trigger. He opened for me the cabala of wild things’ tracks. If to-day I can tell the difference between the lacework of a partridge’s foot and a crow’s, to this uncle be the glory. From him comes the intuition that leads me to the marsh pool where the only wild ducks on a hundred miles of coast are billing up the wild rice grains. He taught me the art of going through the woods without snapping a twig, and matching my breath to the rhythm of the wind in the pines, with the heart like a candle flame that one shields from the wind with a cupped hand. And when I stalk a creature with ears like microphones and a nose like an angel of light, I am raising this uncle the monument he would choose. For he was quicksilver, the grace of the great blue heron’s wing, thistledown, and the mystery of the woods.

Still these uncles do not hold a candle to the uncle of the holidays. Here was a man that was a walking calendar and smelled of hidden gumdrops. Torpedoes for the Fourth and lemonade to give coolness after we had singed our outsides with his bottled brimstone. He made lovers of us at Valentine’s and fools of us for All Fools’ Day. He kept Santa Claus alive years after he should have been sunning his shins and taking his ambrosia neat with Thor and Hercules in the land where the dead gods go. Jackstraws, turtles that shook wire legs in glass boxes, candy bottles holding a real liquid, popguns with painted broomstick barrels — never a birthday of ours did he miss. Nor did he remember the wrecked kite of the first lustrum when he unwrapped the kaleidoscope of the second. He must have been a master psychologist; a heart set on a thing got that thing with never a word said. He never missed. He was a fairy godmother in pants. The drabbest of Mondays might blossom out at twilight with coaches out of pumpkins and twinkling things to light the way to bed. Crumpled paper that opened out into flowers when you dropped it into water. He did not wait for red-letter days — he was an inventor of gala days of his own. Had he had his way, the modern calendar would have outshone the mediæval, in which you could scarcely turn a page or set your hand to a task without brushing the gilt off a halo. He was all pocket, and when he left after a visit he was a smaller man, and his clothes hung loose upon him. Folks called him a spendthrift. Folks lied. All the pennies left from food and clothing he laid up in a bank that does not fail. Cornelia could bring forth her two living jewels; this man had a baker’s dozen. The shining eye of a child is more worth than the diamond.

But there remains a last uncle, Aldebaran among the lesser stars. Uncle Felix was the phœnix of the genus. Yet I doubt if another thousand years will see him re-created. With other uncles it was a case of bending over ever so little so that they might see through the knotholes where we viewed the world. But this uncle was of our height, for all his breadth of back broadened with the tubbing of ten thousand trawls, for all his moustache that had ridden the gales of Fundy like a banner. His china-blue eyes never had to shift focus. The snow might lie on his temples; there were only spring and bluets on the slopes of his brain. His legs gave one the impression of having just slipped down from a hobbyhorse. Fathers might snort to see a grown man on the merry-go-round with the children at Topsham Fair. But Uncle Felix, true to his name of blessedness, rode those wooden horses with the same vigor with which he rode the deck of the schooner he owned and could handle a thousand miles out on the ocean.

He was the sea to us, and tall masts tipping the Polar Star. He had lived the sort of life the best boys would choose. Close to the weather and tides, with no sentimentality about the beauty he moved through, knew like his right hand, and need not explain. Day had meant power and clean going; night, sleep like a soundless fog. He had not looked ahead to the comfort of old ago. Life was to-day and this cod at the end of the line. He had taken an occupation for a religion. The catalogues of the kinds of ships, of knots and yards and masts, were litanies of holy names. Somehow God had taken on for him the lines and grace of a schooner full-sailed. He walked dry land with a step that made allowance for a lurch.

It was my fortune that this farmer of the sea had been penned by stiffening joints to smaller waters of the coast, and to one of those farms where fins and feathers consort. He kept cows and chickens, but on a nautical schedule, and gathered in his potatoes with an eye on the wind and a fine respect for tides. His farm was amphibian; if it had lean mows, it had a fat boat. shop. Here was blue magic and unicorn’s horn; sword of swordfish, jaw of shark, dogfish pelts for sandpaper, vertebra: of leviathan the right shape to accommodate a boy’s breech snugly, beaded sea urchins to crumble at a breath, shells to hear all Atlantic in, the figurehead of a woman of very sufficient breasts and eye most unfeminine, a spyglass that curiosity could stretch to ten feet. Objects like incantations; you could not climb a step up a ladder without brushing your back against romance. Baby curls of shavings littered the floor. All hours he could spare from turnips and sleep Uncle Felix spent here. He could whittle out a sloop that made a boy’s heart swell. He was one of the last of that race of geniuses that could rig up a sixinch brigantine inside a narrow-necked bottle. He let us children sit knee to his knee, mind to his mind, while he turned out beauty from white pine.

He had to have some dealings with grown-ups, of course. But he never really learned their language. He had courted, married, and bedded a wife, and raised up some sons. But he had packed them off to sea as soon as ever they began to show signs of manhood. He moved independently of them now. Of his wife he had not the remotest knowledge. Uncle Toby was a master of experienced gallantry to him. He took his wife as he took a change in the wind. When the sun shines, make the most of it and out with all your canvas; when it turns squally, reef all home. It is easy to learn the thousand delicate ropes of a ship; but a woman is not so easy. No, grown-ups were not his choice; he had remained a boy.

The last act of this splendid uncle was like a diadem upon him. Across four thousand miles, from an alien place to which his wife had taken him for his comfort’s sake, from a place where there was no Atlantic to turn blue in his eyes, he came at eighty-eight all the way back to the coast that had been his cradle and his hobbyhorse, his religion and his light. Because the rheumatism had twisted his hands and age hung shackles on his feet, he was not able to get more than a cook’s berth on a boat. And he who had steered schooners had to take ship on a mean, small mackerel smack. But he had the joy of seeing the land go down in the wake of a vessel again, and the sea curve up like a bowl of blue peace around him. That summer was a perfect valediction. After it, he went back home and died as easily as a child falls asleep.

Among the boys grown tall that all good uncles are, this one was the most successful at the fine art of being an uncle of any that I have ever known. I am very proud that he was mine.