Читать книгу Exit Laughing - Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury - Страница 5

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Funny, this business of being a descendant. If you believe, as I do, that prenatal influences are the main governing forces within us, then we are agreed that the fused and reconciled traits of his forebears form the core of the average man’s character, and environment, generally speaking, is no more than the shellac which overlies these passed-on heritages, adding color of personality to the present individual and emphasizing his separate identity, but without materially altering the amalgam of the original pattern. Accepting this basic premise and still not giving our progenitors all the credit nor yet all the blame for what you or I may be, I say it’s fair and proper that a man should look to his traceable antecedents for slants and trends when he begins sorting out his reactions to life.

Speaking for myself, I’m sure that my love for the place where I was reared is not altogether due to the circumstances of my being a native son. I’m sure it goes deeper than that for into it enters the elemental fact that on both sides of our family, certain members were among the early residents of Kentucky. They helped to tame the rampaging young commonwealth when it was very young and very rampageous. Their children, and for the most part, their children’s children to the third generation and the fourth even, were born on its soil, lived there and died there and their dust was resolved back into that same friendly mould. I can scarcely remember a time when I did not rejoice in my birthright nor fail to boast of it. Indeed, I was parentally encouraged to do so. People of some of the geographical and national divisions are so constituted. It’s part of their ancestral fiber. To cite conspicuous examples, being a Virginian is a profession, and being a South Carolinian is a trade to be worked at in season and out, but Kentuckianism is an incurable disease, a disease, though, to be proud of. On the other hand, I’ve rarely heard a man brag about coming from Armenia—or Arkansas.... But a Bostonian of the older stocks would brag, or a Californian, either of the Forty-niner breed or the Spanish breed; and a Texan, surely, and likewise a Louisianian, especially one whose people dated to the first French settlements or the subsequent admixture of the Arcadian exiles. Practically all Danes are like that, too, and most of the Scots, and invariably the Irish. Since I’m part Irish and all Kentuckian, I can offer two valid excuses for my vainglorious behavior in this regard. The world over, the Irish either are boasting of their blood or spilling it—frequently in other people’s quarrels.

The progeny of the first of my discernible ancestors to land in America spent all of one century and the greater part of another in backwoods wandering before one multiplying branch of them made the belated discovery that Kentucky was the fittest of all possible spots for a permanent establishment. To this day some of their posterity wonder at such blindness and such a lamentable delay.

The original claimable sire, namely, Henry Cobb, was one of three brothers who came out of the County Mayo in their youth and bided a while at Norwich, in England, before sailing in 1626 for Jamestown in His Britannic Majesty’s realm of Virginia where, being Irish and therefore naturally inclined to help run a government or tear it apart, Henry Cobb promptly became a deputy of the general court. When Jamestown Colony fell on evil days the younger brothers, John and James, stayed behind to breed copiously, first in Virginia and later in North Carolina and Georgia. There seems to have been a strain of Belgian hare in these prolific founders. Several counties of Georgia still abound in Cobbs to an almost unreasonable extent.

Leaving John and James behind, Henry Cobb went up the empty shore line to Plymouth in Massachusetts; that would be in 1634 or thereabouts. He had been reared within the Catholic fold but apparently was pliably inclined in the matter of orthodoxy, for very soon he was being ordained a deacon at a dissenters’ meetinghouse. At intervals since then, some of us have returned to the Ancient Faith. I have a cousin who is a nun and I had a great-uncle, who, though outwardly a pious Episcopalian for all his days, on his deathbed sent ninety miles for a priest to come and shrive him, much to the astonishment of a soundly evangelical household. Deacon Henry must have had a Celtic sense of humor. By two wives he begat thirteen offspring and named the last one “Experience.” For his memory we claim also a traditional distinction. So far as the evidence shows, he was the first man among the English-speaking dwellers on this continent who got a license to dispense hard drinks. The church files at Scituate for 1636 are said to record that “Good Man Cobb being of sober mien and excellent discretion, is authorized to draw spirits.”

Some fifteen years ago I was at a private moving-picture showing in a New York home. The telepathic instinct made me uneasily aware that somebody in one of the rows behind was directing a concentrated thought wave at me. I peeped diagonally over my shoulder and there, with a cryptic, intent look on her face, sat a handsome woman. As our eyes met, she flushed, then smiled and gave a small nod compounded of cordiality and embarrassment. When the show ended I made my way toward her and she held out her hand and said:

“I am Mrs. De Lancey Nicoll.”

I was saying that I knew her husband, a prominent New York lawyer, when she broke in:

“That’s not my excuse for staring at you so hard. What I want you to tell me, or rather, have you confirm it, because I’m practically sure of it already, is that you’re a direct descendant, as I am, of Deacon Henry Cobb, who died in Barnstable, Massachusetts, nearly three hundred years ago?”

I admitted the charge and on the strength of it claimed kinship with her as a cousin, a very distant cousin perhaps, but a most charming one.

“Wait,” she said, “let me finish. We’ve met before, many, many times, although never until now did I behold you in the flesh. As a child, at my grandmother’s home on the Massachusetts coast, I used to spend hours looking at a painting of the Deacon—a treasured family possession. It fascinated me. He had such a—a—well, let’s say rugged face. And I’ve never forgotten a single line of it and that’s why a few minutes ago I almost jumped out of my chair when my glance happened to fall on you. With your hair down to your shoulders and a jerkin buttoned up to your throat and a big flat white collar around your neck, you might have posed for that portrait yourself. I can’t imagine a closer resemblance than the one between you and our revered common ancestor.”

I told her I wasn’t so sure I’d go on thereafter revering the Deacon. It seemed to me his prankish shade, after waiting almost three centuries to play the joke, might have refrained from implanting his image upon a defenseless great-great-and-so-on-and-so-forth-grandchild nine or ten generations removed. I’m relating the incident now for proof that the dubious legacy of a physical likeness may be transmitted out of the past, along with the diluted temperamental essences of bygone beings. By a kind of inverse process, immortality would seem to go rearward. Whether you agree with the theologians that it goes forward across the boundaries of some other world is another thing.^[1]

To judge by the available genealogy, the Deacon’s tribe were a restless tribe and a fruitful one. They did their replenishing best to populate Massachusetts and Maine and Connecticut and northern New York State and eventually Vermont. It was at Fairhaven Village in Vermont that my great-grandfather, Gideon Dyer Cobb, in 1799 assembled his brood and added it to an immigrant train made up of twelve neighboring families, most of them of Irish birth or the Irish breed, and practically all of them bound by blood or marriage to one another; and in ox-wagons this little band started on a nine months’ trek, first overland and then by barge from Pittsburgh, for the southwestern fringe of the white man’s civilization on the nearermost edge of the Chickasaw Nation. The expedition capably was led by my great-grandmother’s uncle-in-law, Colonel Matthew Lyon, that stormy petrel of New England politics whose vote in Congress made Thomas Jefferson president over Aaron Burr, and who now was going, with these few followers of his, to the farthermost tip of the lusty new state of Kentucky, there to form, in a more congenial environment than Vermont’s, a defensive and offensive alliance with a rising young firebrand of Tennessee, just over the border, by name Andrew Jackson.^[2]

According to the fragmentary testimony these aliens from a thousand miles distant didn’t remain aliens much longer than it took for them to change the original name of their tiny settlement on the Cumberland River from “Yankeetown” to Eddyville. Politically and socially they were presently of a homogeneous piece with a scattering population of adventurous newcomers from Virginia and the two Carolinas who, by a scanty margin of time, had preceded them to these remote parts. Sixty-odd years later their descendants, almost to the last man and to the last woman, went with the Confederacy, even more unanimously than their kinspeople back yonder in New England went with the Union.

This great-grandfather of mine came poor into the wilderness, but having, I take it, both Down-East thrift and Gaelic adaptability, didn’t stay that way long. Almost before the clearings were made he had enrolled himself among that fabulous crew, half-hoss and half-alligator by their own telling—the keelboatmen. On great raftlike “broadhorns” of virgin timbers he loaded the produce of this fecund archipelago—red whisky, already beginning to be known as Bourbon; heavy rank leaf tobacco grown in the so-called Black Patch of western Kentucky and Tennessee; corn, hemp, pelts, hides, pumpkins and hoop-poles, but particularly the whisky and the tobacco—and floated it out to the Ohio and down the Ohio into the Mississippi, past the dens of the river pirates and through hostile Indian country on to the French and Spanish possessions and sold his cargo at New Orleans and broke up his arks for shipbuilding and then rode horseback or walked home again over the Natchez Trace, a more perilous journey even than the water cruise had been. He was a partner in the setting up of the first iron furnace established west of the Allegheny Mountains and benefited thereby, for literally his farm stood on top of a virgin ore bed and coal was to be had out of a near-by hill for the digging of it; besides, he was a metalworker by trade as his father before him had been, an acknowledged adept at the crudely primitive bloomer process for fabricating steel.^[3]

Previously to this, with logs of his own hewing, he had built the only tavern on the then lonesome lower bends of the Cumberland River, afterward adding on a warehouse for tobacco and cotton, and a store where he purveyed everything from ox-bows and hymnbooks to flintlock muskets, mill wheels and painkillers. Also, being elected a magistrate, he took the title of “Squire,” and flourishingly used it.

In my possession are various huge ledgers and day books, saved from the rambling brick building which he subsequently erected and which his heirs enlarged until it spraddled over an acre. When this waterside landmark was torn down, forty-odd years ago, some thoughtful soul rescued these ponderous volumes.^[4]

By them, I can follow the course of the clan’s increase through those long-ago periods. One of the very earliest entries deals with purchases for the proprietor’s account against the coming of the first of his children to be born on Kentucky soil—my grandfather, it was, in 1804. I can read how my grandfather at twenty-one was taken into the firm; and I know when he married by the tally of nankeen and blue broadcloth and glass buttons and brass buttons and a flowered silk waistcoat for the groom; and here too are included the fineries and fripperies for the bride and her bridesmaids. There is a whole page of such listings. Another page enumerates nails and bolts and hinges and wooden sashes and what-all, so there I fix approximately the date when the young couple built their own home. On the same plot of ground, as affairs prospered with them, they reared their second house and it the finest in the town, and they called it White Hall, after her home in the wife’s native state of Virginia.

So you see, we Cobbs were going up in the world and qualifying for admission to the ranks of the self-ordained landed gentry of the Border South. Today a state penitentiary spreads its grim cell blocks across the knoll of shaly limestone which was the site for that homestead; and where my grandmother’s rose garden was is the “death house” and to it poor forsaken wretches are brought to die by the electric chair.

From the showings in one of these tattered books, it is made plain that no matter what else a customer at Cobb’s Corners bought, whether for his lady or his children or his slaves or for himself, he bought also strong liquors—a bottle of this, a demijohn of that, a gallon jug of some favored potable, a piggin or a whole keg even. They were giants—lusty, thirsty giants—in those days. Here through three years one may trace the rise to alcoholic heights and the ultimate defeat of a certain Matthew Gracey, obviously of the kith, since both Matthew and Gracey are names interwoven with ours.

There is a graphic continuity to this tragic epic—like a Hogarthian saga done in paled ink instead of etched drawings. I mark how that the aforesaid Matthew Gracey inaugurates his career as a steady consumer by buying each week a quart of domestic spirits. Shortly his demand increases to two quarts weekly, and then to three and four and eventually five.

Presently a deeply significant charge is inscribed:

“To Matthew Gracey, Esquire, for breaking four glass tumblers while drunk—eight shillings.”

There comes an hour in this culminating series of purchases all marching toward the inevitable disastrous climax when, after seven consecutive sales on as many days, this pregnant line is set down:

“To Matthew Gracey, by slave girl Sukey, four quarts of French brandy.”

Next occurs a lapse of six days and then:

“To relict of Matthew Gracey, eight yards of black bombazine for mourning.”

Doubtlessly the widow could have saved money by just pouring deceased back in the barrel but she didn’t, because some two months farther along she is credited with an advance payment on a marble tombstone to be freighted downstream from Nashville. Thus concludes the tale of Matthew Gracey’s rise as a toper and his fall—and his fatal finish. He lost the fight, true, but who would say he wasn’t trying?

[1]

Here is another bit of hereditary freakishness which manifests itself in our stock. As far back as we may trace the thing, half of every generation on the Cobb side of the family have been born red-haired and the other half have been born dark-haired and usually the colors are alternately shown. My grandfather was one of eight; four auburn-tops, four black-headed. My father was one of six; same division. I was one of four. My sister, the first-born, had almost the loveliest reddish-gold hair I ever saw. I made my advent with hair so brown as to be almost black and with the thick, bristly dark brows which likewise are a characteristic of the male members of the flock. Then my brother, a true sorrel, came along and finally my other sister, whose hair was chestnut. There is a legend that the Cobb women are never ugly and the Cobb men always are. Well, from time to time it has been brought to my attention that I was nobody’s pretty boy.

[2]

Under various heads the rugged Colonel Lyon made the front pages of the journals and gazettes of his day. The son of an Irish rebel out of the County Wicklow, who was hanged by the British, he was sold as a bond servant to one of the New England plantations. The price paid for him was a span of steers. Thereafter his favorite oath was, “By the Black Bulls that bought me!” At the taking of Fort Ticonderoga by the Green Mountain Boys he commanded a company under his kinsman-by-marriage, Ethan Allen, and a little later was court-martialed, unjustly he always asserted, for alleged weakness before the enemy. In 1798 he signalized his entry into the national scene at Washington by spitting in the face of a fellow member, Roger Griswold, Federalist from Connecticut, and when on the floor of the House, Griswold in retaliation attacked him with a cane, he felled his assailant, wielding a set of fire tongs which he snatched up from a handy grate. For offering to fight a duel with President John Adams and for assaulting the administration with his tongue and his equally sharp pen he was, as the first notable victim of the odious Alien and Sedition Law, thrust into an unheated dark cell in a Vermont winter. From his dungeon he conducted a successful double-headed campaign for re-election and for the repeal of the obnoxious statute and on the latter triumph was accorded due credit for re-establishing the rights of free speech and freedom of the person in the young Republic. Before he died he had represented three separate constituencies of three separate states in the Congress—Vermont, Kentucky and, toward the last, Arkansas. Only one other ever equaled this record, and that was Shields of Illinois and points both east and west; and Shields, like Lyon, was an Irishman.The Irish have a certain facility at running for office. This is not an original observation with me. It has been said before.

[3]

On at least two other counts, the Cobb-Lyon furnace, as it was called, bulked in border history. It was sold to a factor named Kelly from Pennsylvania; this happened a few years after its establishment.Kelly did not hold with slavery, so from Canton by sailing ship he brought thirty coolies who were landed at New Orleans and fetched overland to this remote Kentucky settlement—perhaps the earliest group of Chinese laborers imported to America. The first man legally hanged in the newly created bailiwick was a negro, for murdering one of these Orientals. Eventually the rest of them were absorbed into the native population. Twenty years ago there still were families in back corners who probably did not suspect that their names were Anglicized versions of Chinese names or that some among them owed their slant eyes and high cheekbones to a Mongolian strain or, if they did suspect it, certainly never bragged on it.Employed as a clerk at the little plant was a young Englishman named Henry Bessemer. It was here, or so he claimed, that through experiments he discovered the Bessemer process for fabricating steel. To him this brought fame and a title, for he was knighted when he took his invention back to England. But one of the Kellys claimed that he had fathered the germ idea and that Bessemer pilfered it from him. What’s more he pretty well established his case. There was much litigation and at least one large book was written—by a Kelly—on the merits of the dispute. Be that as it may, there seemingly isn’t any doubt that the formula which revolutionized the whole industry was worked out here in the half-tamed wilderness.

[4]

Some of the very earliest records—those relating to my great-grandsire’s exploits as a pioneer navigator—were missing or perhaps no such records were ever kept. If this last theory be true, for it there was possibly a reason. By family tradition he originated the ingenious idea of packing into tight casks the strong black native tobacco, leaf, lugs, dirt clods, stalks, stems, trash and all; and dousing the mess with crude sorghum molasses and pressing it to sticky solidity, then freighting the parcels to New Orleans and there transferring them to sailing ships skippered by seafaring State of Maine men who were distant kinsmen of his. These consignees in turn took the chartered cargoes two-thirds of the way around the globe and on the coast of Africa traded for gold dust and ivory; such was the treasured story and it had a most romantic sound, especially that gold dust and ivory part.But a whispered version which never reached my ears until I was near finishing my growth, was to the effect that what my ancestor’s cousins really bartered for was “black ivory,” meaning negro slaves, who were brought back and smuggled ashore in lonely coves and disposed of to Deep South plantations—and that was regarded as a nefarious calling, long even before the traffic was by the Federal government outlawed.I wish I could have got at the secret of that, although certainly my immediate forebears would have deplored such unmannerly curiosity on my part.Some of the existing entries are revealing. For instance, this one:“To postage on letter to lady—one bit.”And this one:“To use of mad stone taken from deer’s belly—for curing rabies—$1.”And this:“To one set of forged neckyokes and chains for slave convoy—$2.”