Smith

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1John Smith entered the University of Missouri that year as a freshman

1910, aged nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his doctorate in philosophy and accepted a teaching position at the same university where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few of the students remembered him clearly after attending his courses. When he died, his colleagues donated a medieval manuscript to the university library as a commemorative contribution. This manuscript is still in the Rare Books Collection and bears the inscription: "Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of John Smith, Department of English. By his members."

A casual student who comes across the name may wonder who John Smith was, but rarely pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Smith's colleagues, who did not hold him in high esteem when he was alive, rarely talk about him now; for the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and for the younger ones it's just a sound that evokes no sense of the past and no identity to connect themselves or their careers with.

He was born in 1891 on a small farm in central Missouri near the village of Booneville, about forty miles from Columbia, home of the university. Though his parents were young when he was born—his father twenty-five, his mother barely twenty—Smith considered them old even as boys. At thirty his father looked fifty; Bent over from his work, he looked hopelessly at the dry piece of land that supported the family from year to year. His mother watched her life patiently as if it were a long moment to endure. Her eyes were pale and blurry, and the tiny lines around her were accentuated by thin, graying hair that she wore straight over her head and tied in a bun at the back.

For as long as he can remember, John Smith has had his duties. By the age of six he was milking the bony cows, throwing the pigs into the pen a few yards from the house and collecting small eggs from a flock of scrawny hens. And even when he began attending country school eight miles from the farm, his day was filled with one or two jobs from before dawn until after dark. At seventeen his shoulders were already beginning to sag under the weight of his job.

It was a lonely household of which he was the only child, and it was held together by the necessity of his work. In the evening the three of them sat in the little kitchen, which was lit by a single kerosene lamp, and stared at the yellow flame; often the only sound that could be heard during the hour between supper and bed was the weary movement of a body on a straight chair and the soft creaking of a beam that was giving slightly with the age of the house.

The house was built in a rough square, and the unpainted beams hung around the porch and doors. It had taken on the colors of the dry land over the years – gray and brown, striped with white. To one side of the house was a long drawing room, sparsely furnished with straight chairs and a few carved tables, and a kitchen where the family spent most of their time together. On the other side were two bedrooms, each with a white-enameled iron bedstead, a single straight chair, and a table with a lamp and washbasin on it. The floors were unpainted planks, unevenly spaced and cracked with age, through which dust constantly seeped and was swept back by Smith's mother every day.

At school, he did his classes as if they were chores, just a little less strenuous than those on the farm. When he finished high school in the spring of 1910, he expected to do more work in the fields; it seemed to him that his father was getting slower and more tired as the months went by.

But one late spring evening, after the two men had spent a day chopping corn, his father accosted him in the kitchen after the dinner dishes had been cleared.

"County agent came by last week."

John looked up from the red and white checked oilcloth spread flat across the round kitchen table. He didn't speak.

"Says they have a new school at Columbia University. They call her a

College of Agriculture. Says he thinks you should go. It'll take four years." "Four years," John said. "Does it cost money?"

"You could work your room and board," his father said. "Your mother owns a first cousin who owns something outside of Columbia. There would be books and such. I could send you two or three dollars a month."

John spread his hands on the tablecloth, which shimmered dully in the lamplight. He had never been further from home than Booneville, fifteen miles away. He swallowed to steady his voice.

"Do you think you could manage the store yourself?" he asked.

"Your mother and I could do it. I would plant the top twenty in wheat; that would reduce manual labor."

John looked at his mother. "Mummy?" he asked. She said tonelessly, "You do what your da says."

"You really want me to go?" he asked, as if half hoping for a refusal. "Do you really want me?"

His father shifted his weight in the chair. He looked at his thick, calloused fingers, the cracks in which dirt had gotten so deep it couldn't be washed away. He interlaced his fingers and held them up from the table, almost in an attitude of prayer.

"I've never had any formal education," he said, looking down at his hands. "I started working on a farm when I finished sixth grade. When I was young, I never stuck to school. But now I don't know anymore. Seems the land is getting drier and harder to work with every year; it's not rich like it was when I was a boy. The district agent says they have new ideas, methods of doing things that they teach you at university. Maybe he's right. Sometimes when I work in the fields I have to think." He stopped. His fingers spasmed and his clasped hands fell on the table. "I'm starting to think..." He scowled at his hands and shook his head. "You're going to college in the fall.

It was the longest speech he had ever heard his father give. That fall he did not go to Columbia and enrolled as a freshman at the College of the University

Agriculture. He came to Columbia with a new black wool suit that he ordered from the Sears & Roebuck catalog and paid for with his mother's egg money, a worn coat that had belonged to his father, and blue serge pants that he wore once a month had gone to the Methodist church in Booneville, two white shirts, a change of work clothes, and twenty-five dollars in cash his father had borrowed from a neighbor for the fall wheat. He began his trek in Booneville, where his father and mother took him early that morning on the farm's flat-bottomed mule-drawn wagon.

It was a hot fall day and the road from Booneville to Columbia was dusty; He had walked for almost an hour when a boxcar pulled up next to him and the driver asked if he wanted a ride. He nodded and got up in the car seat. His serge trousers were red with dust to the knees, and his face, tanned by sun and wind, was caked with dirt where the dust of the road had mixed with his sweat. During the long drive, he smoothed his slacks with clumsy hands and ran his fingers through his straight, sandy-colored hair, which would not fall flat on his head.

They arrived in Columbia in the late afternoon. The driver dropped Smith on the outskirts of town and pointed to a cluster of buildings shaded by tall elms. "This is your university," he said. "You will go to school there."

After the man pulled away, Smith stood motionless for several minutes, staring at the building complex. He had never seen anything so posing. The red brick buildings stretched upwards from a wide green field punctuated by stone paths and small patches of garden. Beneath his awe, he suddenly felt a sense of security and serenity he had never felt before. Even though it was late, he walked around the campus for minutes only looking like he had no right to enter it.

It was almost dark when he asked a passer-by about Ashland Gravel, the road that would lead him to the farm of Jim Foote, his mother's first cousin, for whom he was to work; and it was after dark when he came to the white two-story frame house where he was to live. He had never seen the Footes before, and it seemed odd going to see them so late.

They greeted him with a nod and eyed him closely. After a moment where Smith stood awkwardly in the doorway, Jim Foote waved him into a small, gloomy drawing room crammed with overstuffed furniture and nick-knacks on matte-finished tables. He wasn't sitting.

"And dinner?" asked Foote. "No, sir," Smith replied.

Mrs. Foote pointed a finger at him and trotted off. Smith followed her through several rooms into a kitchen, where she gestured for him to sit at a table. She placed a jug of milk and several pieces of cold cornbread in front of him. He sipped the milk, but his mouth, dry with excitement, would not take the bread.

Foote came into the room and stood next to his wife. He was a small man, no more than five foot three inches tall, with a thin face and a sharp nose. His wife was four inches taller and heavy; rimless glasses hid her eyes and her thin lips were tight. The two watched hungrily as he sipped his milk.

"Feed and water the cattle, feed the pigs in the morning," Foote said quickly.

Smith looked at him blankly. "What?"

"You do that in the morning," Foote said, "before you go to school. In the evening you feed and beat again, collect the eggs, milk the cows. Chop firewood when you find time. On weekends you help me with everything I do."

"Yes sir," said Smith.

Foote studied him for a moment. "College," he said, shaking his head.

So for nine months he fed and watered the cattle, shed pigs, collected eggs, milked cows and chopped firewood. He also plowed and harrowed fields, dug tree stumps (breaking through three inches of frozen ground in the winter), and churned butter for Mrs. Foote, who watched him with a grim nod of approval as the wooden butter churn squirted milk up and down.

It was housed on an upper floor that had formerly been a storeroom; His only furniture was a black iron bedstead with sagging frames that supported a thin spring mattress, a broken table with a kerosene lamp, a straight chair that sat unevenly on the floor, and a large box that he used as a desk. In the winter, the only warmth it got seeped up through the floor from the rooms below; He wrapped himself in the tattered quilts and blankets he was allowed and blew on his hands so they could turn the pages of his books without tearing them.

He did his work at the university like he did his work on the farm—thoroughly, conscientiously, without joy or sorrow. At the end of his freshman year, his GPA was just under a B; He was pleased it wasn't lower and not worried that it wasn't higher. He was aware that he had learned things he hadn't known before, but to him that just meant he could do as well in his sophomore year as he did in his first.

In the summer after his freshman year, he returned to his father's farm and helped with the harvest. Once his father asked him how he liked school and he replied that he liked it a lot. His father nodded and didn't bring up the matter again.

It wasn't until he returned for his sophomore year that John Smith learned why he had come to college. By his sophomore year, he was a familiar figure on campus. In every season he wore the same black wool suit, white shirt, and tie; his wrists poked out of the sleeves of his jacket and his trousers hung awkwardly around his legs like it was a uniform that had once belonged to someone else.

His working hours increased with the increasing indolence of his employers, and he spent the long evenings in his room systematically doing his classwork; he had begun the course of study that would lead him to a Bachelor of Science degree from the College of Agriculture, and during that first semester of his sophomore year he had two undergraduate courses, a course from the School of Agriculture in soil chemistry, and a course that was becoming rather superficial from required of all university students – a semester overview of English literature.