The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life — Text and Context

Carl was second-generation Norwegian; American-born, American in speech, American in appearance, save for his flaxen hair and china-blue eyes; and, thanks to the flag-decked public school, overwhelmingly American in tradition. When he was born the "typical Americans" of earlier stocks had moved to city palaces or were marooned on run-down farms. It was Carl Ericson, not a Trowbridge or a Stuyvesant or a Lee or a Grant, who was the "typical American" of his period. It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending the Western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the exuberant, October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations for beauty.

They are the New Yankees, these Scandinavians of Wisconsin and Minnesota and the Dakotas, with a human breed that can grow, and a thousand miles to grow in. The foreign-born parents, when they first come to the Northern Middlewest, huddle in unpainted farm-houses with grassless dooryards and fly-zizzing kitchens and smelly dairies, set on treeless, shadeless, unsoftened leagues of prairie or bunched in new clearings ragged with small stumps. The first generation are alien and forlorn. The echoing fjords of Trondhjem and the moors of Finmark have clipped their imaginations, silenced their laughter, hidden with ice their real tenderness. In America they go sedulously to the bare Lutheran church and frequently drink ninety-per-cent. alcohol. They are also heroes, and have been the makers of a new land, from the days of Indian raids and ox-teams and hillside dug-outs to now, repeating in their patient hewing the history of the Western Reserve.... In one generation or even in one decade they emerge from the desolation of being foreigners. They, and the Germans, pay Yankee mortgages with blood and sweat. They swiftly master politics, voting for honesty rather than for hand-shakes; they make keen, scrupulously honest business deals; send their children to school; accumulate land--one section, two sections--or move to town to keep shop and ply skilled tools; become Methodists and Congregationalists; are neighborly with Yankee manufacturers and doctors and teachers; and in one generation, or less, are completely American.

So was it with Carl Ericson. His carpenter father had come from Norway, by way of steerage and a farm in Wisconsin, changing his name from Ericsen. Ericson senior owned his cottage and, though he still said, "Aye ban going," he talked as naturally of his own American tariff and his own Norwegian-American Governor as though he had five generations of Connecticut or Virginia ancestry.

Now, it was Carl's to go on, to seek the flowering.

Unconscious that he was the heir-apparent of the age, but decidedly conscious that the woodshed was dark, Carl finished the pile.

From the step of the woodshed he regarded the world with plaintive boredom.

"Ir-r-r-r-rving!" he called.

No answer from Irving, the next-door boy.

The village was rustlingly quiet. Carl skipped slowly and unhappily to the group of box-elders beside the workshop and stuck his finger-nails into the cobwebby crevices of the black bark. He made overtures for company on any terms to a hop-robin, a woolly worm, and a large blue fly, but they all scorned his advances, and when he yelled an ingratiating invitation to a passing dog it seemed to swallow its tail and ears as it galloped off. No one else appeared.

Before the kitchen window he quavered:

In the kitchen, the muffled pounding of a sad-iron upon the padded ironing-board.

Mrs. Ericson's whitey-yellow hair, pale eyes, and small nervous features were shadowed behind the cotton fly-screen.

"I haven't got noth-ing to do-o."

"I piled piles of it."

"Then you can go and play."

"Then play some more."

"I ain't got nobody to play with."

"Then find somebody. But don't you step vun step out of this yard."

"I don't see _why_ I can't go outa the yard!"

Again the sound of the sad-iron.

Carl invented a game in which he was to run in circles, but not step on the grass; he made the tenth inspection that day of the drying hazelnuts whose husks were turning to seal-brown on the woodshed roof; he hunted for a good new bottle to throw at Irving Lamb's barn; he mended his sling-shot; he perched on a sawbuck and watched the street. Nothing passed, nothing made an interesting rattling, except one democrat wagon.

From over the water another gun-shot murmured of distant hazards.

Carl jumped down from the sawbuck and marched deliberately out of the yard, along Oak Street toward The Hill, the smart section of Joralemon, where live in exclusive state five large houses that get painted nearly every year.