RALPH TOWER, Alwyn's father, was not an educated man. Because of their poverty his parents could not hope to send more than one son away to school. They wanted a preacher in the family, for no calling was so honorable as the ministry. Jim, their eldest, was more studious than the other two boys, spoke fluently, and took pains with his appearance. So, while still almost a child, he was chosen to receive an education, and it was useless for Ralph and Evan to have ambitions; they would have to stay on the farm in any case.
The three grew up together happily and roughly. Their mother disciplined them with a worn army belt which hung behind the door; their father ignored them unless there was work to be done. They spent all their spare time in the woods, hunting coons by lantern light, trapping muskrats and skunks, which they drowned and washed in a deserted well. One evening a cow who had dropped her calf alone in the marshes, charged them, and Ralph, the last of the three to take flight, broke his leg. Later Evan fell from a beam in the barn without being seriously hurt, and when he was eleven a furious ram kept him in a tree for several hours. Their clothes and their bodies exhaled a faint animal odor, which, according to their father, made the house smell like a wigwam. They were afraid of girls, and preferred each other to their friends. Undernourished but energetic, half savage but hopeful, a poor farmer's ordinary sons, dressed in overalls or grown men's clothes hastily cut down, with copper toes on their boots and rabbits' feet in their pockets for good luck until their late adolescence they were as much alike as young dogs of the same litter.
Then mature character developed out of the characterlessness of boyhood, and they drew apart, at first imperceptibly, then with decision, as if, while roving like aimless wild animals over the countryside, they had come upon roads leading in three directions; and Jim, suddenly sober and self-conscious, began to look toward the future which the piety of his parents had chosen for him.
Those were hard times in Wisconsin. They heard their father say to their mother that the farm would have to be mortgaged before long; and for some time. the younger boys thought they were as well off as Jim, for apparently, in that family, no one could have a start in life.
But in 1894 Timothy Davis began to send their uncle Leander money from the West every month. Leander was in poor health, and one day he proposed to his brother and sister-in-law that an "old bachelor's wing" be added to their house; the money Timothy sent should pay for it, keep them from running into debt, and enable them to send Jim to college as well. Henry and Rose promised to care for him as long as he lived; so he gave up the mail route, sold his house. and garden, and as soon as the new rooms were completed made his home in one of them, where he sat by himself all day, paying no attention to the farmwork, rarely taking part in family discussions, and watching his nephews with the timid solicitude which is an old bachelor's way of loving another man's sons.
The youngest, Evan, was a wistful, freckled stripling with a quick temper. The path of an unlucky life seemed to have been blazed ahead of this boy by his peculiar spirit which no one understood, and people began to say that he would come to a bad end. He loved no one but his uncle, and it was certain that he and his father would never be at peace. He kept threatening to run away from home, and Ralph at least knew that sooner or later he would.
Ralph wanted to go to a school in Milwaukee and become a veterinary surgeon, having a passion for animals, dreaming of race horses, and prize bulls, and dogs worth as much as a whole farm. But he was obviously the one who would never go anywhere, who would have to make sacrifices, and learn to be patient with their father as he grew old and arbitrary. His brothers were going to leave the country, but he would have to turn back among the still only half-cultivated hills, to go on being what they had all been as ignorant children, what their forefathers had been: a child of nature. He was strong, obedient, and moody, resenting what the future might do, as if, mysteriously, at the age of eighteen, the past had already done its worst.