Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

There was a “bad” woman came to town in Tar’s time. Everyone said she was bad. No good woman in town would have anything to do with her.

  She was living with a man and wasn’t married [to him]. He may have had another wife — somewhere. No one knew.

  They came to town on a Saturday and Tar was at the station selling papers. Then they went to the hotel and later to the livery barn where they got a horse and buggy.

  They drove around town and then rented the Woodhouse place. It was a big old place and had been empty a long time. The Woodhouses were all dead or had moved away. Lawyer King was agent. He let them have it — of course.

  They had furniture to buy, stuff for the kitchen, everything.

  How everyone knew the woman was bad Tar did not know. They just did.

  Of course all the merchants sold them [fast] stuff, fast enough. The man threw his money around. Old Mrs. Crowley worked for them in their kitchen. She didn’t care. When a woman is old like that and poor she doesn’t have to be [so] particular.

  Tar didn’t either — a boy doesn’t. He heard the men talking — at the station, the livery bam, the barber shop, the hotel.

  The man bought everything the woman wanted and then went away. After that he [only] came weekends, about twice a month. They took the morning and afternoon papers and a Sunday paper too.

  What did Tar care? It made him tired the way people talked.

  Even the children, girls and boys coming home from school, made a kind of shrine of the place. They went around that way purposely and when they came to the house — it was surrounded by a high hedge — they all became suddenly silent.

  It was as though someone had been murdered there. Tar went right in — with the papers.

  People said she had come to town to have a baby. She wasn’t married to the man, who was older than she was. He was a city man and rich. He spent money like a rich man. So did she.

  At home — in the city where the man lived — he had a respectable wife and children. Everyone said so. It might be he belonged to a church, but now and then — weekends — he sneaked off to Tar’s little town. He was keeping a woman.

  Anyway she was pretty and lonesome.

  Old Mrs. Crowley, who worked for her, wasn’t much. Her husband had been a drayman and was dead. She was one of the muttering kind of cross old women but she could cook pretty good.

  The woman — the “bad” woman — began to take notice of Tar. When he brought the paper she began to talk to him. It wasn’t because he was anything special. It was the only chance she had.

  She asked him questions about his mother and father, about John and Robert and the babies. She was lonesome. Tar sat on the back porch of the Woodhouse place talking with her. There was a man named Smoky Pete working in the yard. Before she came he never had any regular job, was always hanging about saloons and cleaning out spittoons for a drink — jobs like that.

  She paid him as much as though he had been any good. At the end of the week, when she settled with Tar, suppose she owed him twenty-five cents.

  She gave him a half dollar. Well, she would have given him a dollar but was afraid it would be too much. She was afraid he would be ashamed or have his pride hurt and wouldn’t take it.

  They sat on the back porch of the house and talked. Not a woman in town had been to see her. Everyone said she had come to town just to have the baby by a man she wasn’t married to but, although he watched closely, Tar saw no signs.

  “I don’t believe it. She’s regular size — slim if anything,” he said to Hal Brown.

  Then she got to having a horse and buggy from the livery barn afternoons and taking Tar with her. “Do you think your mother will care?” she asked. Tar said, “No.”

  They went into the country and got flowers, oceans of them. Mostly she sat in the buggy and Tar gathered the flowers, crawling up hillsides, going down into gullies.

  When they got home she gave him a quarter. Sometimes he helped her carry the flowers into the house. Once he went into her bedroom. Such dresses, fine flimsy things. He stood looking, wanting to go and touch, as he had always been wanting to touch the bits of lace his mother wore on her one good black Sunday dress when he was small. His mother had the same one good dress yet. The woman — the bad one — saw the look in his eyes and, getting all the dresses out of a big truck, spread them on the bed. There must have been twenty. Tar had never dreamed there could be such beautiful [splendid] things in the world.

  That afternoon, when Tar was leaving, the woman kissed him. It was the only time she ever did.

  The bad woman left Tar’s town as suddenly as she came. No one knew where she went. She got a telegram in the afternoon and left on the night train. Everyone wanted to know what was in the telegram but of course the telegraph operator, Wash Williams, wouldn’t tell. What is in a telegram is a secret. You don’t dast tell. An operator isn’t allowed, but Wash Williams was a grouch anyway. He might have leaked a little but he enjoyed having everyone hint around and then not saying a word.

  As for Tar, he got a note from the woman. It had been left with Mrs. Crowley and had five dollars in it.

  Tar was a good deal upset, having her leave that way. All her things were to be sent to an address in Cleveland. The note said, “Good-bye, you’re a good boy,” nothing more.

  Then later — about two weeks later — a bundle came from the city. It had in it some clothes for Margaret and Robert and Will and a new sweater for himself. Nothing else. The express was pre-paid.

  [It was a month later when one day a neighbor woman came to visit Tar’s mother when he was at home. There was more “bad” woman talk and Tar heard it. He was in the next room. The neighbor woman said how bad the strange woman was and blamed Mary Moorehead for letting Tar be around with her. She said how she would never have let a son of her’s go near such a person.

  [Mary Moorehead said nothing of course.

  [There might have been that kind of talk going on all summer. Two or three men had tried to question Tar. “What does she say to you? What do you talk about?”

  [“None of your business.”

  [When they had questioned him he had said nothing and had hurried away.

  [His mother merely changed the subject, switched the conversation to something else. That would be her way.

  [Tar listened a moment and then tiptoed out of the house.

  [He was glad about something but did not know just what it was. It might have been he was glad he had a chance to know a bad woman.

  [Perhaps he was simply glad his mother had the good sense to let him alone.]

  CHAPTER XXI

  THE COMING OF death to Tar Moorehead’s mother was without special dramatic intensity. She died in the night and only Doctor Reefy was in the room with her. There was no deathbed scene, the husband and children gathered about, a few last courageous words, weeping children, a struggle and then the soul taking flight. For a long time Doctor Reefy had been expecting her death and was not surprised. Having been summoned to the house and the children having been sent upstairs to bed he sat down to talk with the mother.

  There were words said that Tar, lying awake in a room above, could not hear. As he afterwards became a writer he often reconstructed in his imagination the scene in the room below. There was a scene in a story by Chekhov, the Russian. Readers will remember it — the scene in the Russian farm house, the anxious country doctor, the woman dying — wanting love before she died. Well, there had always been some kind of understanding between Doctor Reefy and his mother. The man never became his own friend, never talked intimately to him as Judge Blair did later, but he liked to think that the last talk of the man and woman in the little frame house in the Ohio town was full of significance to them both. Tar later found out, it is in their close relationships people live. He wanted such relationships for his mother. She had seemed, in life, such an isolated figure. Perhaps he underestimated his father. The figure of his mother, as she lived later in his fancy, seemed so delicately poised, capable of q
uick flashing rushes of feeling. If you do not make quick and intimate connections with the life that goes on in others about you you do not live at all. It is a difficult thing to do and causes most of the trouble in life but you must keep trying. That is your job and if you shirk it you shirk life [entirely].

  Later thoughts of that sort in Tar, concerning himself, often transferred to the figure of his mother.

  Voices in a room downstairs in a small frame house. Dick Moorehead, the husband, was away in the country on a painting job. What do two grown people talk about at such a time? The man and woman in the room below laughed softly. After the Doctor had been there for some time Mary Moorehead went to sleep. She died in her sleep.

  When she was dead the doctor did not awaken the children but went out of the house and got a neighbor to drive off to the country for Dick and then coming back sat down. There were a few books about. At several times, during long winters when Dick had no money, he became a book agent — it enabled him to be abroad, going from house to house in the country, where he managed to make himself welcome though he sold but few books. As would be natural the books he tried to sell were concerned mostly with the Civil War.

  There would be a book about a character called “Corporal Si Klegg,” who enlisted in the war as a green country boy and became a corporal. Si was full of the naïveté of the free-born American country lad, never having taken orders before. He was however brave enough. The book delighted Dick and he read it aloud to the children.

  There were other books, more technical, also concerned with the war. Was General Grant drunk during the first day of the battle of Shiloh? Why did not General Meade pursue Lee after the victory at Gettysburg? Did McClellan really want the South licked? Grant’s Memoirs.

  Mark Twain, the writer, became a publisher and published Grant’s Memoirs. All of Mark Twain’s books were sold by agents who went from house to house. There was a special agent’s copy with blank ruled pages at the front. That was where Dick set down the names of people who agreed to take one of the books when it came out. Dick might have sold more books if he had not taken so much time for each sale. Often he would stop at some farm house several days. In the evening the family gathered about and Dick read aloud. He talked. It was fun to hear him if you weren’t depending on him for a living.

  Doctor Reefy sat in the Moorehead house, with the dead woman in the next room, reading one of Dick’s books. Doctors see much of death at first hand. They know all people must die. The book in his hand, in plain cloth binding so much, in leather, half Morocco, so much more. You do not sell many fancy bindings in a small town. Grant’s Memoirs was the easiest book to sell. Every family in the North thought they ought to have it. It was a moral duty, as Dick always pointed out.

  Doctor Reefy sat reading one of the books and he had himself been in the war. Like Walt Whitman he had been a nurse. He never shot anyone, never shot at anyone. What did the doctor think[? Did he think of war,] of Dick, of Mary Moorehead? He had married a young girl when he was himself almost an old man. There are some people you get to know a little when you are a child that you puzzle about all your life and you can’t quite make them out. Writers have a little trick. People think writers take their characters from life. They do not. What they do is to find some man or woman who, for some obscure reason, arouses their interest. Such a man or woman is invaluable to a writer. He takes the few facts he knows and tries to build a whole life. People are starting places for him and when he gets through, often enough, what results has little or nothing to do with the person he started with.

  Mary Moorehead died during a night in the fall. Tar was then selling papers and John had gone to the factory. When Tar got home in the early evening that day, his mother was not at the table and Margaret said she was not feeling well. It was raining outside. The children ate in silence, the depression that always came with one of the mother’s bad times hanging over the house. Depression is something on which the imagination feeds. When the meal was over Tar helped Margaret wash the dishes.

  The children sat around. The mother had said she did not want anything to eat. John went off [early] to bed and so also did Robert, [Will and Joe]. In the factory John was on piece work. Just when you have got your speed up and can make pretty good wages they change things on you. Instead of getting forty cents for polishing a bicycle frame they cut you down to thirty-two. What are you going to do? You[‘ve] got to have a job.

  Neither Tar nor Margaret was a bit sleepy. Margaret made the others go upstairs softly so as not to disturb mother — if she was asleep. The two children got their school lessons, then Margaret read a book. It was a new one the woman who worked in the post office had let her have. When you sit around like that it’s best to think of something outside the house. Only that afternoon Tar had been in a dispute with Jim Moore and another boy about baseball pitching. [Jim] said Ike Freer was the best pitcher in town because he had the most speed and the best curves and Tar said Harry Green was the best. Both being on the town team they did not of course pitch against each other so you couldn’t tell for sure. What you had to judge by was what you saw and felt. It was true Harry hadn’t as much speed but you felt, when he pitched, surer of something. Well, he had some brains. When he knew he wasn’t so good he said so and let Ike go in but if Ike wasn’t so good he got bull-headed and if you took him out he got sore.

  Tar thought of a lot of arguments with which to lay out Jim Moore when he saw him next day and then he went and got the dominoes.

  The dominoes were slid silently across the boards of the table. Margaret had put her book aside. The two children were in the kitchen, that also served as a dining room, and there was an oil lamp on the table.

  You can play a game like dominoes a long time and not think about anything much.

  When Mary Moorehead was having one of her bad times she breathed irregularly. Her bedroom was right next the kitchen and at the front of the house was the parlor where the funeral was afterwards held. When you wanted to go upstairs to bed you had to go right through the mother’s bedroom, but there was an offset in the wall and if you were careful you could go up without being seen. Mary Moorehead’s bad times were coming more and more regularly. The children had almost got used to them. When Margaret had got home from school the mother was in bed and looked very pale and weak and Margaret wanted to send Robert off for the doctor but the mother said, “Not yet.”

  A grown person like that and your mother.... When they say “no” what are you going to do?

  Tar kept pushing the dominoes across the table and now and then looked [up] at his sister. Thoughts kept coming. “Harry Green may not have as much speed as Ike Freer but he’s got a head. In the long run a good head will tell. I like a man to know what he’s doing. I guess there are ball players in the big league who are bone-heads all right but that makes no difference. You take a fellow who can do a lot with what little he’s got. There’s a fellow I like.”

  Dick was in the country painting the inside of a new house Harry Fitzsimmons had built. He had taken the job on a contract. When Dick took a job on a contract he hardly ever made [any] money.

  He couldn’t figure [much].

  Anyway, it kept him busy.

  You sit in a house, playing dominoes with your sister, on a night like that. Who cares who wins?

  Now and then either Margaret or Tar went to put a stick of wood in the stove. Outside the house it rained and the wind came in through a crack under the door. There were always holes like that in the houses the Mooreheads lived in. You could throw a cat through the cracks. In the winter the mother, Tar and John went around and nailed strips of wood and pieces of cloth over the cracks. It kept out some of the cold.

  Time passed, perhaps an hour. It seemed longer. The fears Tar had been having for a year John and Margaret also had. You go along thinking you are the only one who thinks and feels things but if you do you’re a fool. Others are thinking the same thoughts. In General Grant’s Memoirs it tells how, when a man asked
him whether or not he was afraid when he was going into a battle he said, “Yes, but I know the other man is afraid too.” Tar hadn’t remembered many things about General Grant but he remembered that.

  All of a sudden, that night when Mary Moorehead died, Margaret did something. As the two sat playing dominoes they could hear the mother breathing irregularly in the next room. The sound was soft and broken. Margaret got up in the middle of a game and tiptoed softly to the door. She stayed listening awhile, hidden so the mother couldn’t see, then she came back into the kitchen and made a sign to Tar.

  She had got all worked up just sitting there. That was it.

  It was raining outside and her coat and hat were upstairs but she did not try to get them. Tar wanted her to take his cap but she wouldn’t.

  The two children got outside the house and Tar knew at once what was up. They went along the street to Doctor Reefy’s office, not saying a word to each other.

  Doctor Reefy wasn’t there. There was a slate on the door and on it was written, “Back at 10 o’clock.” It might have been there for two or three days. A doctor like that, who hasn’t much practise and doesn’t want much, is pretty careless.

  “He might be at Judge Blair’s,” Tar said, and they went there.

  At a time like that, when you are afraid something is going to happen, what you do is to remember other times when you were scared and everything turned out all right. It is the best way.

  Well, you are going for the doctor and your mother is going to die, although you don’t know it yet. Other people you meet in the street go along just as they always do. You can’t blame them.

  Tar and Margaret walked to Judge Blair’s house, both getting sopping wet, Margaret without her coat and hat. There was a man buying something in Tiffany’s drug store. Another man went along with a shovel on his shoulder. What do you suppose he’s been digging, on a night like this? In the hallway of the City Hall two men were in an argument. They had got into the hallway to keep dry. “I said it was Easter when it happened. He denied it. He don’t read his Bible.”