The Distributive Passions

“February 5th was DOGS’ DOOMSDAY, or general dog killing; when all citizens of the canine brood were to be shot. Many were those that fell on that day.— But from whatever cause it was that they bore a peculiar fondness for this place, as we killed off the old, new ones seemed to come in, out of the country; so that we could scarce get rid of the society of this species.” Paul Brown, Twelve Months in New Harmony

The dogs kept coming, as did the colonists, none caring, apparently, that New Harmony was itself in the grip of a killing distemper. On the third day of the dog-slaughter, we struggled from bed more or less with the sun. Not a one of us hurried, bone-weary and quarter-crazed as we were–until we smelled the coffee. “Coffee! There’s coffee!” There had been no coffee anywhere since sometime early in the day before, even, some claimed, at the tables of No. 5. There was never much outside the big house and the tavern. But coffee had been promised. “Coffee in the morning” was the word, but we had all of us had at least our fill of such. This time, though, Old Bob spoke true, and big pots of the stuff boiled at the edge of the bonfires. The wind, which had blown the smell of the pyre into our Republican encampment all night, blew that welcome, quickening aroma at our ragged phalanx.

Scalding hot, bitter and cut with grain, cooked up on a charnel fire, we gulped it heedlessly as we cleaned weapons, sharpened scythes. Old Bob himself came down to general this last stage of the campaign, risking tongue and taste buds with the rest as he quizzed the ranks and laid his plans. Officers of all quarters and communities made their reports, and the old man gave out his orders with a fine disregard for which of his troops were, or were not, members of the association, which were, under other circumstances, allies or antagonists. Brown he bossed like the rist, and like the rest our de facto chief accepted command resignedly. Some clutch of strays remained in our quarter, and then there was the feral pack to be dealt with. Despite the work of the past two day, this latter seemed to be growing. The Germans in their log cabins, kept up all night by their baying, now claimed that it was a wolf that led the pack. Owen nodded at this intelligence and, paused, warming his hands at the fire and then his face with his hands. “We save the guns, then. For now, it’s scythes and spades. You know your chores. To it!” And tossing back the dregs of his coffee, he turned as if to start immediately back to No. 5.

It was then that the mongrel half-crawled from the tall grass, wounded and whimpering. The little black cur had been one of the tavern dogs, living on scraps and kindness, not so different, it now seems to me, from many of us who lived at the margins of New Harmony and the proprietors’ pleasure.

It was not a sight to put our work, that ahead or that accomplished, in any too kind a light. We had seemed for a moment–coffee in hand and an end apparently in sight–more fully a community that an any time that I could remember. But it was an exhausted, savage community, caught in a moment of rest–savage in all the ways that Brown had spoken of in his Gray Light. Forgetful, cruel to animals, unfeeling, united around our chief. “Well,” said Old Bob, “I guess I must ‘to it.’”

The bare facts of the next moments are these:

A gun was raised.
Someone cried, “No!”
A boy began to sob.

Robert Owen, inspiration and primary proprietor of the community of New Harmony, turned, took two long strides, grasped a newly sharpened axe.

Paul Brown, communist and philosopher, the usual intensity of his gaze now deepened into something baleful, tightened his grip on a scythe-handle.

And each of the rest of us, awakening, or so it seemed to me, to some new, unfolding state of affairs, stirred and shifted, picked up, or put down, tools, or weapons.

Something stirred. The cur whimpered. The boy moved.

In the distance, a howl–wolf? dog?–from the direction of the German encampment.