Читать книгу New Harmony, Indiana - Jane Blaffer Owen - Страница 21

A Standard Oil of Indiana filling station stood across Church Street from the Lab and the Rapp-Maclure-Owen House, darkly foreshadowing the challenges of the journey on which I was embarking to reinvigorate New Harmony (11 on town map). Trucks roared noisily along Church Street, Highway 66, on their way to or from Illinois (see area map). This shining white station with its red, blue, and white torch, an ersatz imitation of the torch that ancient Greek athletes carried before their Olympic Games, bluntly proclaimed: “I am the only real thing in this town; I give gas and cold drinks to truckers all day and night, and they adore my Muzak.” There was no possibility of a full night’s sleep in the Lab.

Fantasy kept pace with my indignation: “Even with your imitation torch, you’re not the truth and reality of New Harmony but rather a servant that pretends to be more important than the geologists who once lived across the street. Were it not for their intellect and devotion to geology, you might not even be on this corner.” My anger was not directed at the attendants. The filling station itself represented, for me, Prospero’s servant Caliban, of Shakespeare’s Tempest, who stoked the fire and brought the water. All went well on the island until Prospero imprisoned Ariel (a spirit of imagination and of art), an act that elevated Caliban’s ambitions. Matters could not be righted until Caliban resumed his rightful place and Ariel could be set free and given liberty to create. I never doubted that the filling station would someday, somehow, disappear or that the aspirations of earlier generations would find contemporary expression.

Standard Oil Company gas station in 1930, a decade before my arrival in New Harmony.

Don Blair Collection. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Southern Indiana.

Kenneth and I were unable to negotiate with the owners of the Standard Oil Company gas station; the asking price exceeded the resources at my disposal. The gas station remained for decades, an abomination and a gadfly to my efforts. From that day onward, I opted for the greater reality of the faded old houses and half-ruined Granary.

Setting my sights on what could be achieved in 1946, I bought a Harmonist house three blocks southeast of the Lab on Steammill, so called because the Harmonists had built a steam-powered factory on that street to manufacture shingles and weatherboards for the wooden houses of what historians now refer to as their middle period (12 on town map). The idea of creating a tranquil escape hatch for my family excited and challenged me.

Years earlier, nomadic Indian tribes across the plains had hunted animals and stretched their hides for tepees. Later, European pioneers supplanted them and cut down trees to build log cabins. In my time, I too would forage for building materials to repair and restore a house that would be as protectively mine as were those earlier shelters for my forbears. Notwithstanding my husband’s plea to friends—“If you see Jane with a hammer, for God’s sake, take it away!”—I persisted.

I loaded my tools in the pickup truck of a local contractor, Fred E. “Silo” Cook, who knew where to find old barns and abandoned farmhouses with weathered siding, ripe for my plucking. We pried loose old planks and a stable door; we gathered fieldstones for future garden paths. The joy of a hunter returning home with a bag full of fresh game would not have exceeded mine as we brought the quarry of my first expedition to Number V or “No. V,” my name for the Harmonist house on Steammill.

Interior of my Harmonist house No. V on Steammill, late 1940s.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

A word of advice to young couples, wherever you live and whatever your budget for building your first home: don’t let it reflect solely the expertise of an architect or a decorator, however considerable their talents. Abandoned barns and derelict houses may lie beyond your reach, but not urban warehouses filled with seasoned lumber and fixtures from dismembered houses. Paint at least one room of your house with your own hands! Such physical involvement won’t tire you as much as three sets of tennis. Yes, your hands will ache after using a wire brush to clean old barn wood, but you’ll feel pride with the end result and unexpected joy.

I respectfully disagree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, who gave us the freedom to pursue happiness, because I never find happiness by pursuing it. For me, happiness is an untamed creature that comes unexpectedly from behind and licks a tired elbow after a long day of work. I have heard its sound in the song of a bird that has brought twigs and feathers to a nest.

Harmonist house No. V holds some of my happiest memories. My husband took refuge there from the truck stop noises that assailed the Lab, where his aunt still resided. Our daughters Janie and Carol could play at No. V without disturbing Auntie Aline’s prolonged naps and celebrate their birthdays. In July 1949, while preparing for Carol’s fifth birthday, I asked whom she wanted to invite to her party. Her quick response was indicative of her noble nature and my concept of society, “Mother, please invite everyone who can hear us having a good time.”

Our first Thanksgiving in No. V during 1948 brought an unexpected reason to be thankful. I had hired Ott Conner to fire my furnace. Ott’s former boss, a farmer who placed little faith and no capital in modern farm machinery, had employed Ott to harness a reluctant mule to an ancient corn rake to harrow or harvest the farmer’s corn, a partnership that lasted until the mule decided to make a sudden bid for freedom, taking his entangled muleteer over rough territory with him. The odd accident had left Ott with a permanent limp and the inability to maneuver stairs in a straightforward manner, so he worked for me only irregularly. However intermittent his days in my employ or daunting my cellar stairs, Ott never mentioned his infirmity and always arrived with a cheerful smile.

Preparations were well under way on the eve of Thanksgiving. I had just purchased a bushel of apples and pears from Ollie, one of the Hardy brothers who owned orchards in the Hardy Hills, east of town. I was eager to try the recipes a neighbor on Steammill Street had given me for apple butter and pear honey. I put Janie, age seven, and Carol, age five, to work in the kitchen, white aprons tied around their necks, stirring fruits in iron pots. The delicious aroma of cloves and cinnamon filled the air of the barn-like central room when Ott tapped gently at the front door.

He declined to enter, not from timidity, but because he wanted me to hear his truck’s motor running outside my gate, the heavy breathing of the horsepower that had brought its rider with an urgent message. The messenger was not exactly standing upright in my doorway, for a crooked right leg tilted his long, lean body sideways. But his invitation was whole-bodied, his self-worth intact. “I’m on my way to Carmi for Thanksgiving, Mrs. Jane,” he said. “I’ve got a quart of ice cream and a whole chicken in my truck, and I wish to God you were coming!” I was thankful that humble Ott had extended a firm hand of friendship to me, as I was still considered an outsider by some in town.

While No. V holds good memories, my first Harmonist house also reminds me of my early reckless approach to restoration. My partners in crime were teenage schoolboys: Donald “Donnie” Hatch, the Travelstead brothers, and a smattering of Russells and Brands. They wanted money for bicycles and Scout uniforms. I needed their young muscles and laughter. The walls of No. V were an easy prey for male-hunter instinct as they attacked wallpaper and flaky plaster with crowbars and victorious cries. My own murder weapon was a rotary sander with a seven-inch sandpaper disc, which quickly but inexpertly removed thick layers of paint from overhead beams. Circular marks on finely ground, honey-colored poplar wood are now less visible than in those scarlet-letter days but still remain.

I found an adult carpenter to install in the downstairs bedroom paneling made from wide planks that Silo Cook and I had taken from an old barn. Thin and long-faced Mark, a somber figure as if from Picasso’s Blue Period, arrived one morning more taciturn than usual.

“What’s wrong, Mark?”

After a few minutes of silence, he blurted out accusingly, “You’re teaching my daughter to dance.”

Janie and Carol sitting on the stairs of No. V in their white aprons, 1948.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

I was unprepared for this outburst of undisguised rage. I had studied dance as a student at Bryn Mawr with Josephine Petts, who learned the Duncan method of dance. It helped orient me to nature and improved my posture, for sisters Isadora and Elisabeth had taught pupils to walk so the sun could touch their chests. I wanted to pass on what I had learned to anyone who wished to attend my classes in the Ribeyre Gymnasium (13 on town map). More than a dozen girls came, including my carpenter’s daughter.

“But Mark, the girls love their classes. They walk out holding their heads high and shoulders straight; surely you’ve noticed a difference in Mary.” I then made an unforgivable mistake, for I pointed to the barn siding, which Mark was applying to the wall, and traced with my finger the meandering path a famished termite had left on one of the boards. “See, even termites dance as they eat their way through wood.”

Mark was too angry to speak; he left the house and never returned. This was my first but not my last encounter with what seems to me a rigid, joyless way of viewing religion, a view I have never shared.

I found other, more congenial workers. The most memorable was Harvey, an African American brickmason from nearby Princeton. He tenderly fondled one of the old firebricks I had collected. “These are from a slow-fire, wood-burning kiln, Miss Jane. I like them. I’ll take the job. If you let me sleep here at night, I can finish the whole wall and the chimney in a week.”

Harvey was provided with a cot in the unfurnished house, and I brought his meals to him. He pretty much kept to himself because, in those days, blacks had to be inconspicuous in the all-white community of a small southern Indiana town. I spent my mornings admiring the artistry of his masonry; when he inserted an occasional black brick among the pinkish red and coral ones, the gesture seemed symbolic, reminding me that racial prejudice could infect northern communities as easily as those in the South. The town had disregarded Robert Owen’s belief that the role of rational religion in society was “in promoting, to the utmost in our power, the well being and happiness of every man, woman, and child, without regard to their class, sect, sex, party, country, or colour.”¹

I found other employment for my child-labor gang: they followed me with my seven-inch disc sander to my next operation, at the house of George and Annie Rawlings, who had arrived from Ontario by 1950 (14 on town map). The boys helped me clean old bricks for the foundation of a modern greenhouse that George was supervising (16 on town map). We gathered the bricks from the town dump, where they and other objects worth salvaging had long ago been heedlessly discarded. The discovery of a limestone plinth was significant.

Students of our architectural history believe the plinth was once part of the Harmonist brick cruciform church. In the future, the plinth would reside at the center of the St. Benedict Cloister Garden near the New Harmony Inn (17 on town map). From the former site of the dump, Richard Meier’s glistening white Atheneum would rise in the mid-1970s as an orientation and education center for visitors (18 on town map). Fellow preservationists, don’t overlook the middens of your historic districts, and take with you eager scavengers like the boys who enlivened my excursions.

The hearth of No. V photographed by my friend Sibylle de l’Épine when she visited in 1950.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

After loading our discoveries on my golf cart, the boys would wave, like heroes in a ticker-tape parade, to pedestrians we zoomed past. They were proud passengers on the only golf cart in town, and they had a mission. Donnie Hatch’s wide grin shone through the brick dust on his face as he called out to passersby, “Hey, you guys, New Harmony is going to have a greenhouse!”

I shared his enthusiasm, but for a different reason. On the site where the Lab now stands, Father Rapp’s followers had built a marvelous greenhouse on rollers (to facilitate adjustment to weather changes) to house his orange trees. No records exist indicating that David Dale removed it to make way for his laboratory. Whatever the cause of its demise, I decided that a new greenhouse, albeit one without wheels, would serve a Harmonist tradition and protect potted plants in winter.

Donnie Hatch’s excitement, I think, came from an expectation of future amenities too long absent from New Harmony. A few years later he watched and welcomed the bittersweet advent of the first swimming pool in town, added behind No. V. It would be essential for Janie to exercise her polio-affected legs in water, but her primary thoughts were for others: “Oh good, Mother! We can teach everybody to swim!” It was equally important that New Harmony children have swimming lessons. Recent gravel digging in the Wabash had created dangerous eddies. The river where Kenneth’s generation had learned to swim was no longer safe, and too many local boys had drowned. My friend Don Blair, an engineer, agreed wholeheartedly with me that swimming classes were necessary; he supervised and recruited teachers to give lessons to all the children who wanted to learn. That first summer, Flossie Tanner, an Owen descendant and beloved civic leader, inspired by Janie’s outreach, initiated professional classes and taught for almost a decade. Other dedicated instructors followed Flossie and have for more than fifty years kept New Harmony boys and girls from drowning in the Wabash.²

Donnie rejoiced in learning to swim. But his hopes for a new school far from the heavy traffic of Highway 66 and with room for an athletic field, though legitimate, were premature.

Nevertheless, there were some instant gratifications for those of us who were learning that removal was as necessary as preservation. Between two Harmonist houses on Granary Street stood a decrepit barn, no longer a storage house for grain but a community center for rats. The low brick columns that supported the barn were high enough for people to throw garbage underneath. Providence alone spared New Harmony a bubonic plague. I finally managed to buy the barn and, with the deed fresh in my pocket, called my young friends to watch a tractor demolish the dismal eyesore. Their loud hurrahs buoyed my spirits. In fact, they still do. Whether clown white from falling plaster or dirt brown from planting squares of zoysia grass on the lawn of No. V, whether silent or cheering, my child laborers bolstered my sometimes insufficient faith. As much as the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins does, they taught me to believe that within each battered Harmonist house and “deep down” in each weed-filled vacant lot or ill-used parcel of land lay the “dearest freshness” and wellsprings of new life waiting to be tapped.

Why did I call my first Harmonist house No. V? There are several reasons for the numbered name of the house that strained my muscles but brought me freedom. Richard Smoley, in his excellent book Inner Christianity, reminds us that the human body is based on a five-fold pattern or pentagon. Leonardo da Vinci confirmed this geometric fact in his drawing of a man measured in ratios of five. Can we, then, with Smoley’s friend Aleister Crowley, dare to believe that not only the famous but also all human beings are stars? Not every child who learns to swim in No. V’s pool or learns the names of flowers in its garden will shine like a planet, but there is reason to hope that each of them may offer pinpricks of light in a darkening world.

And I devoutly hoped that the boys who attended our swimming classes, as they grew into their teens, would remember other lessons from No. V, in particular the difference between clenched and unclenched hands. It may seem necessary sometimes to tighten a fist to punch an adversary; but certainly not in New Harmony, or any town, should fists be permanently clenched. Released and splayed outward, the five fingers of either hand can wave hello to friends or strangers alike. Esther de Waal once told me, “If you want to keep your head, use your hands.” More recently, the Rev. Martha Honaker’s image of stewardship for her parishioners at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in New Harmony strengthened my case for relaxed and open hands: “When our fingers are tightly closed around something, they are unable to receive anything else.”

May all young graduates from our high school never forget that beyond New Harmony’s soup kitchen, which feeds hungry families of Posey County, too many empty and open hands, each with five fingers, reach out for food to sustain life. If No. V, the victorious firstborn of my New Harmony houses, has a message for the youth of the world, it is: “Watch your hands!”

The pool at No. V is ready for swim lessons offered through the Robert Lee Blaffer Foundation, summer 2014.

Photograph by Janet Lorence.