The Sandburg Treasury Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Rootabaga Stories

  Three Stories About the Finding of the Zigzag Railroad, the Pigs with Bibs On, the Circus Clown Ovens, the Village of Liver-and-Onions, the Village of Cream Puffs

  Five Stories About the Potato Face Blind Man

  Three Stories About the Gold Buckskin Whincher

  Four Stories About the Deep Doom of Dark Doorways

  Three Stories About Three Ways the Wind Went Winding

  Four Stories About Dear, Dear Eyes

  One Story—“Only the Fire-Born Understand Blue”

  Two Stories About Corn Fairies, Blue Foxes, Flongboos, and Happenings That Happened in the United States and Canada

  Rootabaga Pigeons

  Two Stories Told by the Potato Face Blind Man

  Two Stories About Bugs and Eggs

  Five Stories About Hatrack the Horse, Six Pigeons, Three Wild Babylonian Baboons, Six Umbrellas, Bozo the Button Buster

  Two Stories About Four Boys Who Had Different Dreams

  Two Stories Told by the Potato Face Blind Man About Two Girls with Red Hearts

  Three Stories About Moonlight, Pigeons, Bees, Egypt, Jesse James, Spanish Onions, the Queen of the Cracked Heads, the King of the Paper Sacks

  Two Stories Out of the Tall Grass

  Two Stories Out of Oklahoma and Nebraska

  One Story About Big People Now and Little People Long Ago

  Three Stories About the Letter X and How It Got into the Alphabet

  Early Moon

  Short Talk on Poetry

  Pictures of Today

  Children

  Wind and Sea

  Portraits

  Birds and Bugs

  Night

  End Thoughts

  Wind Song

  New Poems

  Little People

  Little Album

  Corn Belt

  Night

  Blossom Themes

  Wind, Sea, and Sky

  Prairie-Town Boy

  Prologue: Prairie Town

  One: Home Folks

  Two: The House on Berrien Street

  Three: A Young Republican

  Four: Hungry to Learn

  Five: Days of Play and Sport

  Six: Fair and Circus Days

  Seven: The Hangout

  Eight: The Dirty Dozen

  Nine: First Paydays

  Ten: Milk Wagon Days

  Eleven: In and Out of Jobs

  Twelve: Working for Fun

  Thirteen: Learning a Trade

  Fourteen: A Milk Route Again

  Fifteen: On the Road

  Sixteen: In the Army

  Abe Lincoln Grows Up

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Index of Titles for Stories and Poems

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 1970 by Lilian Steichen Sandburg, Trustee

  Illustrations copyright © 1970 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  ROOTABAGA STORIES

  Copyright, 1922, 1923, by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  Copyright, 1950, 1951, by Carl Sandburg

  EARLY MOON

  Copyright 1920, 1922, 1930 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  Copyright © 1928, 1944, 1946, 1948, 1950, 1956, 1958 by Carl Sandburg

  Copyright 1916, 1918 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.

  WIND SONG

  Copyright © 1928, 1944, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1953, 1956, 1958, 1960, 1964 by Carl Sandburg

  Copyright, 1936, by Curtis Publishing Company

  Copyright 1916, 1918 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.

  Copyright 1920, 1922, 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  PRAIRIE-TOWN BOY

  Taken from ALWAYS THE YOUNG STRANGERS

  Copyright, 1952, 1953, by Carl Sandburg

  ABE LINCOLN GROWS UP

  Taken from ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE PRAIRIE YEARS

  Copyright, 1926, 1928, by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  Copyright 1925, 1926 by the Pictorial Review Company in the United States,

  Great Britain, and Canada

  Copyright © 1953, 1954, 1956 by Carl Sandburg

  ISBN 978-0-15-270180-2 hardcover

  ISBN 978-0-15-202678-3 paperback

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-120818

  eISBN 978-1-328-52176-7

  v1.0118

  Introduction

  by Paula Sandburg

  WHEN I LOOK back now it seems to me that Carl and I were always surrounded by children, books, and animals. The children had everything that the two of us had to give—love, attention, and, in Carl’s case, the gift of imagination and humor.

  Carl was a wonderful storyteller, and he was never lacking in inspiration. In the early days when the Rootabaga Stones were written, there were few stories for children that were not about kings and queens and princes and princesses in castles, or peasants in huts. This was the folklore and literature of Europe. But Carl thought that American children should have something different, more suited to their ideals and surroundings. So his stories did not concern knights on white chargers, but simple people, such as the Potato Face Blind Man who played the accordion, the White Horse Girl and the Blue Wind Boy, or commonplace objects, a rag doll and a broom handle, a knife and fork.

  At first Carl read the stories to the girls at the midday meal, partly to find out whether they would enjoy this kind of tale. He found out soon enough, for they were absorbed, delighted with the names, often chuckling over the way he played with words. They had their favorites, I remember. Janet would call for “The Wedding Procession of the Rag Doll and the Broom Handle” or for “Shush Shush,” while Margaret liked best “Bimbo the Snip” or “Jason Squiff” with his popcorn hat and popcorn mittens.

  Every child, I think, can sympathize with the desire of Gimme the Ax to get away from the house where “everything was the same as it always was” to the Rootabaga Country where things were so different, so impossible.

  The prairie town where Carl was born and reared was in the land of Lincoln. It held memories of Lincoln, of the Lincoln-Douglas debates at Knox College, of the underground railway there that operated before and during the Civil War. It had honored the Civil War nurse, Mother Bickerstaff, with a statue. So it was natural that Carl should become interested in writing a biography of Lincoln. He knew that there was no good biography of him available that would appeal to children and this was what he intended to write. But he became so immersed in the book that it developed into a two-volume biography for adults, The Prairie Years. With the four succeeding volumes, The War Year
s, it eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for history. After its publication the publishers edited the special version of The Prairie Years for younger readers which appears in this volume. By an odd quirk of circumstance a book intended for children became a book for adults and then in turn became a book for children, Abe Lincoln Grows Up.

  Later, when he wrote his autobiography, Always the Young Strangers, he thought that children would be interested in what boyhood was like in the Middle West at the close of the nineteenth century. Prairie-Town Boy, which appears in this volume, is Carl’s own story, edited for young readers.

  Carl loved children, and they in turn were charmed by him. He enjoyed writing for them because he felt that their response to poetry and ideas was honest and direct. He wanted to open their minds to the possibilities that existed beyond their experience.

  The wonder and enchantment that Carl created for our children with his stories and poems enriched their lives and the lives of our grandchildren. I hope that all of the children who read these stories and poems will experience some of that pleasure and I hope that some of them will be lucky enough to find an older person who will share it with them as we did.

  Rootabaga Stories

  To Spink and Skabootch

  Three Stories About the Finding of the Zigzag Railroad, the Pigs with Bibs On, the Circus Clown Ovens, the Village of Liver-and-Onions, the Village of Cream Puffs

  PEOPLE:

  Gimme the Ax

  Please Gimme

  Ax Me No Questions

  The ticket agent

  Wing Tip the Spick

  The four uncles

  The rat in a blizzard

  The five rusty rats

  MORE PEOPLE:

  Balloon pickers

  Baked clowns

  Polka-dot pigs

  HOW THEY BROKE AWAY TO GO TO THE ROOTABAGA COUNTRY

  GIMME THE AX lived in a house where everything is the same as it always was.

  “The chimney sits on top of the house and lets the smoke out,” said Gimme the Ax. “The doorknobs open the doors. The windows are always either open or shut. We are always either upstairs or downstairs in this house. Everything is the same as it always was.”

  So he decided to let his children name themselves.

  “The first words they speak as soon as they learn to make words shall be their names,” he said. “They shall name themselves.”

  When the first boy came to the house of Gimme the Ax, he was named Please Gimme. When the first girl came, she was named Ax Me No Questions.

  And both of the children had the shadows of valleys by night in their eyes and the lights of early morning, when the sun is coming up, on their foreheads.

  And the hair on top of their heads was a dark wild grass. And they loved to turn the doorknobs, open the doors, and run out to have the wind comb their hair and touch their eyes and put its six soft fingers on their foreheads.

  And then because no more boys came and no more girls came, Gimme the Ax said to himself, “My first boy is my last and my last girl is my first, and they picked their names themselves.”

  Please Gimme grew up, and his ears got longer. Ax Me No Questions grew up, and her ears got longer. And they kept on living in the house where everything is the same as it always was. They learned to say just as their father said, “The chimney sits on top of the house and lets the smoke out; the doorknobs open the doors; the windows are always either open or shut; we are always either upstairs or downstairs—everything is the same as it always was.”

  After a while they began asking each other in the cool of the evening after they had eggs for breakfast in the morning, “Who’s who? How much? And what’s the answer?”

  “It is too much to be too long anywhere,” said the tough old man, Gimme the Ax.

  And Please Gimme and Ax Me No Questions, the tough son and the tough daughter of Gimme the Ax, answered their father, “It is too much to be too long anywhere.”

  So they sold everything they had, pigs, pastures, pepper pickers, pitchforks, everything except their ragbags and a few extras.

  When their neighbors saw them selling everything they had, the different neighbors said, “They are going to Kansas, to Kokomo, to Canada, to Kankakee, to Kalamazoo, to Kamchatka, to the Chattahoochee.”

  One little sniffer with his eyes half shut and a mitten on his nose laughed in his hat five ways and said, “They are going to the moon, and when they get there, they will find everything is the same as it always was.”

  All the spot cash money he got for selling everything, pigs, pastures, pepper pickers, pitchforks, Gimme the Ax put in a ragbag and slung on his back like a ragpicker going home.

  Then he took Please Gimme, his oldest and youngest and only son, and Ax Me No Questions, his oldest and youngest and only daughter, and went to the railroad station.

  The ticket agent was sitting at the window selling railroad tickets the same as always.

  “Do you wish a ticket to go away and come back, or do you wish a ticket to go away and never come back?” the ticket agent asked, wiping sleep out of his eyes.

  “We wish a ticket to ride where the railroad tracks run off into the sky and never come back—send us far as the railroad rails go and then forty ways farther yet,” was the reply of Gimme the Ax.

  “So far? So early? So soon?” asked the ticket agent, wiping more sleep out his eyes. “Then I will give you a new ticket. It blew in. It is a long slick yellow leather slab ticket with a blue spanch across it.”

  Gimme the Ax thanked the ticket agent once, thanked the ticket agent twice, and then instead of thanking the ticket agent three times, he opened the ragbag and took out all the spot cash money he got for selling everything, pigs, pastures, pepper pickers, pitchforks, and paid the spot cash money to the ticket agent.

  Before he put it in his pocket, he looked once, twice, three times at the long yellow leather slab ticket with a blue spanch across it.

  Then with Please Gimme and Ax Me No Questions he got on the railroad train, showed the conductor his ticket, and they started to ride to where the railroad tracks run off into the blue sky and then forty ways farther yet.

  The train ran on and on. It came to the place where the railroad tracks run off into the blue sky. And it ran on and on chick chick-a-chick chick-a-chick chick-a-chick.

  Sometimes the engineer hooted and tooted the whistle. Sometimes the fireman rang the bell. Sometimes the open-and-shut of the steam hog’s nose choked and spit pfisty-pfoost, pfisty-pfoost, pfisty-pfoost. But no matter what happened to the whistle and the bell and the steam hog, the train ran on and on to where the railroad tracks ran off into the blue sky. And then it ran on and on more and more.

  Sometimes Gimme the Ax looked in his pocket, put his fingers in, and took out the long slick yellow leather slab ticket with a blue spanch across it.

  “Not even the kings of Egypt with all their climbing camels, and all their speedy, spotted, lucky lizards, ever had a ride like this,” he said to his children.

  Then something happened. They met another train running on the same track. One train was going one way. The other was going the other way. They met. They passed each other.

  “What was it—what happened?” the children asked their father.

  “One train went over, the other train went under,” he answered. “This is the Over and Under Country. Nobody gets out of the way of anybody else. They either go over or under.”

  Next they came to the country of the balloon pickers. Hanging down from the sky, strung on strings so fine the eye could not see them at first, was the balloon crop of that summer. The sky was thick with balloons. Red, blue, yellow balloons, white, purple, and orange balloons—peach, watermelon, and potato balloons—rye loaf and wheat loaf balloons—link sausage and pork chop balloons—they floated and filled the sky.

  The balloon pickers were walking on high stilts picking balloons. Each picker had his own stilts, long or short. For picking balloons near the ground he had short stilts. If he w
anted to pick far and high, he walked on a far and high pair of stilts.

  Baby pickers on baby stilts were picking baby balloons. When they fell off the stilts, the handful of balloons they were holding kept them in the air till they got their feet into the stilts again.

  “Who is that away up there in the sky climbing like a bird in the morning?” Ax Me No Questions asked her father.

  “He was singing too happy,” replied the father. “The songs came out of his neck and made him so light the balloons pulled him off his stilts.”

  “Will he ever come down again back to his own people?”

  “Yes, his heart will get heavy when his songs are all gone. Then he will drop down to his stilts again.”

  The train was running on and on. The engineer hooted and tooted the whistle when he felt like it. The fireman rang the bell when he felt that way. And sometimes the open-and-shut of the steam hog had to go pfisty-pfoost, pfisty-pfoost.

  “Next is the country where the circus clowns come from,” said Gimme the Ax to his son and daughter. “Keep your eyes open.”

  They did keep their eyes open. They saw cities with ovens, long and short ovens, fat, stubby ovens, lean, lank ovens, all for baking either long or short clowns, or fat and stubby or lean and lank clowns.

  After each clown was baked in the oven, it was taken out into the sunshine and put up to stand like a big white doll with a red mouth leaning against the fence.

  Two men came along to each baked clown standing still like a doll. One man threw a bucket of white fire over it. The second man pumped a wind pump with a living red wind through the red mouth.

  The clown rubbed his eyes, opened his mouth, twisted his neck, wiggled his ears, wriggled his toes, jumped away from the fence, and began turning handsprings, cartwheels, somersaults, and flipflops in the sawdust ring near the fence.