As for John — there was a good deal of the mother in him. That he had seemed to swallow the story as Robert had told it was a comfort to Tar.
CHAPTER VIII
HORSES TROTTING AROUND a race track in an Ohio town on a Sunday morning, in the summer squirrels running along the top of a worn fence, apples getting ripe in orchards.
Some of the Moorehead children went to Sunday school on Sundays, others did not. When Tar had a clean suit of Sunday clothes he sometimes went. The teacher talked of how David slew Goliath and of how Jonah fled from the Lord and concealed himself in a ship bound for Tarshish.
What a strange place that must be, that Tarshish. Words [making] pictures in Tar’s head. The teacher had said little enough about Tarshish. That was a mistake. Thinking of Tarshish Tar couldn’t pay attention to the rest of the lesson. If his father had been teaching the class he might have spread himself about the town, or country, or whatever it was. Why had Jonah wanted to go to Tarshish? Just at that time a passion for race horses had taken possession of Tar. He saw in fancy a wild place of yellow sand and bushes — wind swept. Men were racing horses at the edge of the sea. He may have got the notion out of a picture book.
Most places that are any fun are wicked places. Jonah was fleeing from the Lord. Maybe Tarshish was the name of a race course. It would be a good name.
The Mooreheads never owned any horses and cows but there were horses pastured in a field near the Moorehead house.
A horse had funny thick lips. When Tar held an apple in his hand and put his hand through the fence the lips of the horse closed over the apple so gently he hardly felt anything at all.
Yes, he did. The funny hairy thick lips of the horse tickled the inside of the hand.
Animals were funny creatures but so were people. Tar spoke to his friend Jim Moore on the subject of dogs. “A strange dog, if you run from him and are afraid, will take after you and act as though he was going to eat you up but if you stand still and look him right in the eye he won’t do anything. No animal can stand the steady penetrating gaze of the human eye.” Some people have a more penetrating gaze than others. It’s a good thing to have.
A boy at school had told Tar that when a strange fierce dog took after you the best thing to do was to turn your back, stoop down and look at the dog through your legs. Tar never tried it, but when he grew to be a man he read the same thing in an old book. Boys were telling other boys that same tale on the way to school in the time of the old Norse sagas. Tar asked Jim if he had ever tried it. They both agreed they would, sometime. It would be a ridiculous position to be caught in though, if it did not work. It would sure be a cinch for the dog.
“A better scheme is to pretend to pick up stones. There are hardly ever any good stones around when a fierce dog gets after you but a dog is easily bluffed. It’s better to pretend to pick up a stone than to actually pick up one. If you throw your stone and miss, where are you?”
You’ve got to get used to people in towns. Some are one way, some another. Older people act so strangely.
When Tar was sick that time there was an old man, a doctor, who used to come to the house. He had a good deal to do with straightening the Mooreheads out. What was wrong with Mary Moorehead was that she was almost too good.
If you are too good you think— “Well now, I’ll be patient and kind. I won’t scold, whatever happens.” In the saloons sometimes, when Dick Moorehead was spending money he should have taken home, he heard other men speaking of then-wives. Most men are afraid of their wives.
The men used to say things. “I don’t want the old woman on my neck.” That was just a way of speaking. Women don’t really get on men’s necks. A panther, when he is after a deer, jumps on her neck and pins her to earth but that wasn’t what the man in the saloon meant. He meant he would get Hail Columbia when he got home and Dick hardly ever did get Hail Columbia. Doctor Reefy said he should get it more often. Maybe he gave it to Dick himself. He might have given Mary Moorehead a stiff talking to. Tar never heard any of it. He might have said, “Look here woman, that husband of yours needs to have the gaff put to him now and then.”
In the Moorehead house things changed, got better. Not that Dick became good. No one expected that.
Dick stayed more at home, brought more of his money home. Neighbors came in more. Dick could tell his war stories on the front porch in the presence of some neighbor man, a drayman, a man who was section boss on the Wheeling Railroad, and the children could sit and listen.
Tar’s mother had a way, she always kept, of knocking the props out from under people sometimes with little side remarks but she held herself back more and more. There are some people that, when they smile, make the whole [world] smile. When they freeze up everyone around freezes up. Robert Moorehead got to be a good deal like his mother when he grew older. John and Will were the steady ones. The youngest one of all, little Joe Moorehead, was to be the artist of the family. Later he was what people call a genius and had a hard time making a living.
After his childhood was over, and after she had died, Tar thought his mother must have been smart. He was in love with her all his life. This trick of thinking someone is perfect does not give them much chance. Tar always, after he grew up, let his father alone — just as he was. He enjoyed thinking of him as a lovable improvident fellow. It may even have been that he afterwards attributed to Dick a lot of sins he never committed.
Dick wouldn’t have objected. “Well, take some notice of me. If you can’t figure me out to be good, figure me out to be bad. Whatever you do, pay me some attention.” Something of that sort Dick would have felt. Tar was always a good deal like Dick. He liked the notion of being always in the limelight and hated it too.
It may be that you are most likely to love someone you can’t possibly be like. After Doctor Reefy began coming to the Moorehead house Mary Moorehead changed but not so much. She went to the children’s room after they had gone to bed and kissed them all. She was like a young girl about it, did not seem able to caress them in the daylight. None of her children ever saw her kiss Dick and the sight would have startled them — shocked them a little.
If you have a mother like Mary Moorehead and she is lovely to look at — or you think she is, which is the same thing — and she dies when you are young, what you do all your life afterwards is to use her as material for dreams. It is unfair to her but you do it.
Very likely you make her sweeter than she was, kinder than she was, wiser than she was. What’s the harm?
You are always wanting someone almost perfect to think about because you know you can’t be that way yourself. If you ever do try you give up after a time.
Little Fern Moorehead died when she was three weeks old. Tar was sick in bed that time too. After that night when Joe was born he had a fever. Then he wasn’t much good for another year. That was what brought Doctor Reefy to the house. He was the only man Tar ever knew who talked up to his mother. He made her cry. The doctor had big funny-looking hands. He looked like pictures of Abraham Lincoln.
When Fern died Tar did not even have a chance to go to the funeral but he did not mind, was in fact glad. “If you have to die it’s too bad but the fuss people make is awful. It makes everything so public and kind of terrible.”
Tar escaped it all. It would be the kind of time when Dick would be at his worst and Dick at his worst would be pretty bad.
By being sick Tar missed everything and his sister Margaret had to stay at home with him and she missed it too. A boy always gets the best side of girls and women when he is sick. “It’s their chief time,” Tar thought. He thought about it sometimes in bed. “That may be why men and boys are always getting sick.”
When Tar was sick and had a fever he was out of his head a part of the time and all he ever knew of his sister Fern was a sound sometimes at night in the next room, a sound something like a tree toad. It got into the dreams of his fever time and stayed in his dreams. Afterwards he thought Fern was more real to him than any of the o
thers.
Even when he grew to be a man Tar used to walk along the street sometimes thinking of her. He would be walking and talking with some other man and there she would be, just ahead of him. He saw her in every lovely gesture other women made. If, when he was a young man and very susceptible to women’s charms, he said to some woman, “You make me think of my sister Fern who died,” it was the finest compliment he could pay but the woman did not seem to appreciate it. Pretty women want to stand on their own feet. They do not want to remind you of anyone.
If a child in the family dies and you knew the child alive you always think of him as he was when he died. A child dies in spasms. It is terrible to think about.
But if you have never seen the child.
Tar could think of Fern as fourteen when he was fourteen. He could think of her as forty when he was forty.
Imagine Tar as a grown man. He has had a quarrel with his wife and goes out of the house in a huff. Time now to think of Fern. She is a grown woman. A little now he has got her confused in his mind with the figure of his dead mother.
When he grew older — up around forty — Tar always fancied Fern as about eighteen. Older men like the notion of some woman about eighteen with the wisdom of forty and the physical beauty and sweetness of girlhood. They like to think of such a one as attached to them with iron bands. It’s the way older men are.
CHAPTER IX
OHIO [IN THE spring or summer,] race horses trotting on a race track, corn growing in fields, little streams in narrow valleys, men going out in the spring to plow, in the fall, the nuts getting ripe in the woods about an Ohio town. Over in Europe they clean everything up. They have a lot of people and not too much land. When he grew to be a man Tar saw Europe and liked it, but all the time he was there he had an American hunger and it wasn’t a “Star Spangled Banner” hunger either.
What he hungered for was waste places, roominess. He wanted to see weeds growing, neglected old orchards, empty haunted houses.
An old worm fence where the elders and berries grow wild wastes a lot of land a barbed wire fence saves but it is nice. It’s a place for a boy to crawl under and hide for a while. A man, if he is any good, never gets over being a boy.
In the woods about Middle-western towns in Tar’s time a world of waste places. From the top of the hill where the Mooreheads lived, after Tar got well and began to go to school, you only had to walk across a corn field and a meadow where the Shepards kept their cow to get to the woods along Squirrel Creek. John was selling papers and was pretty busy so maybe he couldn’t go along and Robert was too young.
Jim Moore lived down the road in a white, freshly-painted house and could nearly always get away. The other boys at school called him “Pee-Wee Moore” but Tar didn’t. Jim was a year older and was pretty strong but that wasn’t the only reason. Tar and Jim went through the standing corn, they went across the meadow.
If Jim could not go it was all right.
What Tar did when he went alone was to imagine things. His imagination made him afraid sometimes, it made him glad and happy sometimes.
The corn, when it grew high, was like a forest down under which there was always a strange soft light. It was hot down under the corn and made Tar sweat. At night his mother made him wash his feet and hands before he went to bed so he got as dirty as he wanted to. There was nothing saved [by] keeping clean.
Sometimes he sprawled on the ground and lay for a long time sweating and watching the ants and bugs on the ground under the corn.
Ants, grasshoppers and bugs in general had a world of their own, birds had their world, wild animals and tame animals had their worlds. What does a pig think? Tame ducks in someone’s yard are the funniest things in the world. They are scattered around and one of them makes a honking sound and they all begin to run. The Back part of a duck wobbles up and down when he runs. Their flat feet go pitter-patter, pitter-patter, the funniest sound. And then they all get together and there isn’t anything special going on. They stand looking at each other. “Well, what were you honking for? What’d you call us for, you fool?”
In the woods along a creek in a wasteful country logs lie about rotting. There is first a cleared place and then a place so filled with brush and berry bushes you can’t see into it. It makes a good kind of place for rabbits — or snakes.
In a woods like that there are paths everywhere, leading just nowhere. You sit on a log. If there is a rabbit in the pile of brush in front, what do you suppose he is thinking about? He sees you and you can’t see him. If there is a man and a woman rabbit what are they saying to each other? Do you suppose a man rabbit ever gets a little lit-up and comes home to sit around bragging to the neighbors about when he was in the army, the neighbors having been only privates while he was a captain? If the man rabbit does that he certainly talks pretty low. You can’t hear a word he says.
CHAPTER X
TAB HAD GOT, through Doctor Reefy, who came to the house when he was ill, a man friend. His name was Tom Whitehead and he was fat and forty-two and owned race horses and a farm and had a fat wife and no children.
He was a friend of Doctor Reefy who also had no children. The doctor had married, when he was past forty, a young woman of twenty, but she only lived for a year. After his wife’s death and when he was not at work the doctor went around with Tom Whitehead, with an old tree nurseryman named John Spaniard, with Judge Blair and with a young dudish fellow who got drunk a lot but who said funny, sarcastic things [when he was drunk]. The young man was the son of a United States Senator, now dead, and had been left some money, everyone said he was fooling away as fast as he could.
All of the men who were the doctor’s friends had taken a sudden fancy for the Moorehead children and the race horse man seemed to have picked out Tar.
The others helped John make money and gave presents to Margaret and Robert. The doctor did it all. He managed everything without any fuss.
What happened to Tar was that in the late afternoons or on Saturdays or sometimes on Sundays Tom Whitehead drove along the road past the Moorehead place and stopped for him.
He was in a jogging cart and Tar sat on his knees.
First they went along a dusty road past waterworks pond, then up a little hill and in at the fair ground gate. Tom Whitehead had a stable over near the fair ground and a house near it but it was more fun to go to the race track itself.
Not many boys had such chances Tar thought. John didn’t because he had to work so much and Jim Moore didn’t. Jim lived alone with his mother who was a widow and she fussed over him a lot. When he went anywhere with Tar his mother gave a lot of directions. “Now it’s early in the spring and the ground is damp. Don’t sit on the ground.
“No, you can’t go in swimming, not yet. I don’t want you little fellows to be going in swimming when there are no older people about. You might get cramps. Don’t go into the woods. There are always hunters around shooting off guns. I read in the paper only last week where a boy got killed.”
Better to get killed right out than to fussed at all the time. If you’ve got such a mother, the loving fussy kind, you’ve got to stand for it but it’s tough luck. A good thing Mary Moorehead had so many children. It kept her busy. She could not be thinking up a lot of things for a boy not to do.
Jim and Tar had talked it over. The Moores had some money. Mrs. Moore owned a farm. In some ways it is fine to be the only child a woman has but on the whole you lose by it. “It’s the same way with a hen and chicks,” Tar said to Jim and Jim agreed. Jim did not know how it hurts sometimes — when you want your mother to fuss over you and she is so busy with one of the other kids she can’t pay you any attention.
Not many boys had the chance Tar had after Tom Whitehead took him up. After Tom called for him a few times he did not wait to be asked but went almost every day. If he went to the stables there were always men sitting around. Tom had a farm in the country where he raised some colts and others he bought as yearlings at the Cleveland sale in the spring. At s
uch a sale other men who raise racing colts bring them in and they are sold at auction. You stand around and bid. That’s where a good horse eye comes in.
You buy a colt that hasn’t had any training, or two or four or maybe a dozen colts. Some will turn out corkers and some will be dubs. As good an eye as Tom Whitehead had, and he was known to horsemen all over the state, he made a lot of mistakes. When a colt turned out no good he said to the men sitting around, “I’m slipping. I thought that bay was all right. He has good blood in him but he won’t ever go fast. He hasn’t got that little extra something. It ain’t in him. I guess I better go to an eye doctor and get my eyes fixed up. Maybe I’m getting old and a little blind.”
It was good fun over at the Whitehead stables but better fun at the fair ground tracks where Tom trained his colts. At the stables Doctor Reefy came and sat around, Will Truesdale, the young swell who was good to Margaret and gave her presents, came, Judge Blair came.
A lot of men sitting and talking — always of horses. There was a bench along the front. Neighbor women told Mary Moorehead she shouldn’t let her boy keep such company but she went right on. Many times Tar couldn’t understand the talk. The men were always making little sarcastic cracks at each other, like his mother did sometimes to people.
The men talked of religion and politics and whether or not a man has a soul and a horse hasn’t. Some of the men held to one set of opinions, some to another. The best thing, Tar thought, was to go back into the stable itself.
There was a board floor and a long row of box stalls on each side and in the front of each stall there was an opening with iron bars so he could look through but the horse inside could not get out. A good thing, too. Tar walked along slow, looking in.
“Fassig’s Irish Maid; Old Hundred; Tipton Ten; Willing-to-Please; Saul The First; Passenger Boy; Holy Mackerel.”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 131
