What were they talking about?
“The reason Harry Green is a better baseball pitcher than Ike Freer is that he’s more of a man. Some men are just naturally born strong. There have been famous pitchers in the big leagues who didn’t have much speed or curves either. They just stood up there and used their noodles and they lasted a long time. They lasted twice as long as the ones who had nothing but strength.” —
The best writers [to be found] in the newspapers Tar sold were the ones who wrote about ball players and sports. They had something to say. If you read them every day you learned something.
Margaret was getting soaking wet, through and through. If her mother knew she was out like that, without any coat or hat, she would be worried. People going along under umbrellas. It seemed long hours since Tar had come home from taking his papers. You get a feeling like that sometimes. Some days go by like a shot. Sometimes, in ten minutes, so many things happen it seems hours. It’s that way when two race horses are fighting it out down the stretch, at a ball game when someone is at bat, two men out, two men maybe on bases.
Margaret and Tar got to Judge Blair’s house and sure enough the doctor was there. It was warm and bright inside but they didn’t go in. The Judge came to the door and Margaret said, “Tell the doctor please that mother’s sick,” and she had hardly got the words said when out the doctor came. He went right along with the two children and when they were leaving the Judge’s house the Judge came and patted Tar on the back. “You’re soaked,” he said. He never spoke to Margaret at all.
The children took the doctor home with them and then went upstairs. They wanted to pretend to the mother that the doctor had just come by accident — to make a call.
They went up the stairs as softly as they could and when Tar got into the room where he slept with John and Robert he undressed and got into dry clothes. He put on his Sunday suit. It was the only one he had that was dry.
Downstairs he could hear his mother and the doctor talking. He did not know that the doctor was telling his mother about the trip in the rain. What happened was that Doctor Reefy came to the foot of the stairs and called him down. No doubt he intended to call both children. He made a little whistling sound and Margaret came out of her room dressed in dry clothes just as Tar was. She also had to put on her best clothes. None of the other children heard the doctor call.
They went down and stood by the bed and their mother talked, a little. “I’m all right. Nothing’s going to happen. Don’t worry,” she said. She meant it too. She must have thought she was all right, up to the last. It was a good thing, if she had to go, that she could go like that, just slip off during her sleep.
She said she would not die but she did. When she had spoken a few words to the children they went back upstairs but for a long time Tar did not sleep. Neither did Margaret. Tar never asked her afterwards but he knew she didn’t.
When you are like that you can’t sleep, what do you do? Some try one thing, some another. Tar had heard about the schemes of counting sheep and he tried it sometimes when he was too excited [or upset] to sleep but it wouldn’t work for him. He tried a lot of other things.
You can imagine you are grown up and that you have become something you would like to be. You can imagine you are a big league baseball pitcher or a railroad engineer or a race track driver. You are an engineer and it’s dark and rainy and your engine is swinging along the tracks. Best not to imagine yourself a hero in an accident or anything. Just fix your eyes on the rails in front. You are cutting right through a wall of darkness. Now you are among trees, now in an open country. Of course, when you are being an engineer like that, you are always driving a fast passenger train. You don’t want to fool around with a freight.
You think of that and other things. That night, now and then, Tar heard his mother and the doctor talking. Sometimes they seemed to be laughing. He couldn’t just tell. It might only have been the wind outside the house. Once he was quite sure he heard the doctor run across the kitchen floor. Then he thought he heard a door open and close softly.
It might have been he didn’t hear anything at all.
The worst of all for Tar and Margaret and John and all of them was the next day and the next and the next. A house full of people, a sermon to be preached, the man coming with the coffin, the trip to the graveyard. Margaret got out of it the best. She worked around the house. They couldn’t make her stop. A woman said, “No, let me do it,” but Margaret did not answer. She was white and kept her lips tightly closed together. She went and did it herself.
People came to the house Tar had never seen, worlds of people.
CHAPTER XXII
THE QUEEREST THING was what happened on the day after the funeral. Tar was going along a street, coming from school. School was out at four and the train with the papers did not come until five. He was coming along the street and had got past the vacant lot by Wilder’s barn and there, in the lot, were some of the town [boys] playing ball. Clark Wilder was there and the Richmond kid and a lot of others. When your mother dies you do not play ball for a long time. It isn’t showing the proper respect. Tar knew that. The others knew [too].
Tar stopped. The strange thing was that he played ball that day just as though it hadn’t happened. Well, not quite like that. He never intended to play. What he did surprised him and the others. They all knew about the death of his mother.
The boys were playing three old cat and Bob Mann was pitching. He had a pretty good out-curve and an in-shoot and lots of speed for a twelve-year-old.
Tar climbed over the fence and walked across the field and right up to the batter and took the bat right out of his hand. At any other time there would have been a row. When you play three old cat you have to field first, then hold base, then pitch and catch before you can bat.
Tar didn’t care. He took the bat out of Clark Wilder’s hands and stood up at the plate. He began to taunt Bob Mann. “Let’s see you put her over. Let’s see what you got. Go on. Whiz ’em in.
Bob threw one and then another and Tar soaked the second one. It was a home run and when he got around the bases he took the bat right up and soaked another, although it wasn’t his turn. The others let him. They never said a word.
Tar yelled, he taunted the others, he acted crazy but nobody cared. When he had kept it up for maybe five minutes he left just as suddenly as he had come.
He went, after he had acted like that, on the very day after his mother’s funeral, down to the railroad station. Well, the train wasn’t in.
There were some empty box cars on a railroad siding over by Sid Grey’s elevator near the station and Tar crawled into one of the cars.
At first he thought he would like to be a car like that and be carried away, he didn’t care where. Then he thought of something else. The cars were to [be loaded with grain]. They stood right near the elevator and near a shed in which there was an old blind horse that went round and round in a circle, to keep the machinery going that lifted the grain up to the top of the building.
The grain was lifted up and then ran down into the cars through a chute. They could fill a car in no time. All they had to do was to pull a lever arid down the grain came.
It would be nice, Tar thought, to he still in the car and be buried under the grain. It wouldn’t be like being buried under the cold ground. Grain was nice stuff, it felt nice in the hand. It was golden yellow stuff and would run down like rain and would bury you deep down where you could not breathe and you would die.
For what seemed to him a long time Tar lay on the floor of the car thinking of such a death for himself and then, rolling over on his side, he saw the old horse in his shed. The horse was looking out at him with blind eyes.
Tar looked at the horse and the horse looked at him. He heard the train that had brought his papers come in, but he did not stir. Now he was crying so that he was himself almost blind. It was as well, he thought, to do his crying where none of the other Moorehead children or none of the boys around town cou
ld see. The Moorehead children all felt something like [that]. At such a time you can’t go making a show of yourself.
Tar lay in the car until the train came and went and then drying his eyes crawled out.
The people who had been down to meet the train were walking away up the street. Now, in the Moorehead house, Margaret would be home from school and would be doing the house work. John was at the factory. It was no special fun for John, but he stuck to his job just the same. Things had to go on.
Sometimes you just had to go on, not knowing why, like the blind old horse lifting the grain [up] into the building.
As for the people walking away up the street — it might be that some of them would be wanting a paper.
A boy if he is any good has to be tending up to his job. He has to get up and hustle. When they were waiting for the funeral Margaret didn’t want to make a show of herself so she closed her lips tight and worked. It was a good thing Tar couldn’t be blubbering away his time lying in an empty box car. What he had to do was to bring into the family all the money he could. Heaven knows they would need it all. He had got to tend up to his job.
These the thoughts in Tar Moorehead’s head as he grabbed his bundle of newspapers and wiping his eyes on the back of his hand raced away up the street.
Although he did not know it Tar was, at that very moment perhaps, racing away out of his childhood.
THE END
Beyond Desire
Published in 1932, Beyond Desire draws attention to the plight of workers in America’s south, depicting the harsh conditions endured by men, women and children employed in a textile mill. The novel has drawn comparisons with the work of Henry Roth and John Steinbeck, who similarly highlighted the social and economic inequalities that led to intense hardships for America’s working class – and similarly advocated communism as a possible way out of that struggle, particularly in the light of the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929.
Cover of the first edition
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE. YOUTH
1
2
3
BOOK TWO. MILL GIRLS
1
2
BOOK THREE. ETHEL
1
2
3
4
5
BOOK FOUR. BEYOND DESIRE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Eleanor Gladys Copenhaver, whom Anderson married in 1933. ‘Beyond Desire’ is dedicated to her.
TO
ELENORE
BOOK ONE. YOUTH
1
NEIL BRADLEY WROTE letters to his friend Red Oliver. Neil said he was going to marry a woman in Kansas City. She was a revolutionist and Neil did not know when he first met her whether he was quite one or not. He said:
“It’s like this, Red. You remember the empty feeling we had when we were in school together. I don’t think you had it much when you were out here, but I did. I had it all the time I was in college and after I came home. I can’t talk to Father and Mother about it much. They wouldn’t understand. It would hurt them.
“I guess,” Neil said, “that all of us younger men and women with any life in us have it now.”
Neil spoke in his letter of God. That was a bit strange, Red thought, coming from Neil. He must have got that from his woman. “We can’t hear His voice or feel Him in the land,” he said. He thought perhaps the earlier men and women in America had something he and Red had missed. They had “God,” whatever that had meant to them. The early New Englanders, who had been so intellectually dominant and who had influenced so much the thought of the whole country must have thought they had God really.
If they had, what they had, it had come down to Neil and Red in some way pretty much weakened and washed out. Neil thought that. Religion, he said, was now an old gown, grown thin and with all the colors washed out of it. People still wore the old gown but it did not warm them any more. People needed warmth, Neil thought, they needed romance and, most of all, the romance of feeling, of thinking they were trying to go somewhere.
People, he said, needed to hear voices coming from outside themselves.
Science also had raised hell and the cheap sort of popular knowledge... or what was called knowledge... spread about everywhere now had raised even more hell.
There was, he said in one of his letters, too much emptiness in affairs, in the churches, in government.
The Bradley farm wasn’t far from Kansas City, and Neil went often to the city. He had met a woman he was going to marry. He tried to describe her to Red but didn’t succeed very well. He described her as full of energy. She was a school teacher and had begun reading books. She had become first a socialist and then a communist. She had ideas.
One was that she and Neil should live together for a time before they decided about marriage. She thought they ought to sleep together, get used to each other. So, Neil, a young farmer living on his father’s Kansas farm, began to live with her secretly. She was small and dark, Red gathered. “It seems a little unfair to her to be talking about her with you, another man... you may meet her some day and be thinking of my words,” he said in one of his letters. “But I feel I must,” he said. Neil was one of the outgoing kind. He could be more frank and outgoing in letters than Red and was less embarrassed about telling of his feelings.
He spoke of everything. The woman he had met boarded in a certain house belonging to very respectable people, fairly well-to-do people in the city. The man was the treasurer of a small manufacturing company. They had taken the school teacher in to live with them. She was staying there for the summer, while there was no school. She said, “The first two or three years ought to tell.” She wanted to go through them with Neil without marriage.
“We can’t sleep together there of course,” Neil said, meaning the house where she lived. When he came into town, into Kansas City — his father’s farm was close enough so that he could drive into the city in an hour — Neil went to the house of the treasurer. There was something like a laugh in Neil’s letters telling about such evenings.
There was the woman, small and dark, really a revolutionist, in that house. She was like Neil, the farmer’s son who had been East to college, and like Red Oliver. She came from a respectable church-going family of a little Kansas town. She had gone through high school and had then gone to a normal school. Most young women of that sort were dull enough, Neil said, but this one wasn’t. She had felt from the first that she had a social problem to face as well as an individual woman’s problem. Red gathered, from Neil’s letters, that she was alert and intense. “She has a beautiful little body,” he said, writing to Red. “I admit,” he said, “that when I write such words to another man they mean nothing.”
He said he supposed that any woman’s body became beautiful to the man who loved her. He began touching her body and she let him. Modern girls sometimes went pretty far with young men. It was a way of getting education. Hands on their bodies. It was everywhere almost an accepted fact, even among the older, more frightened fathers and mothers, that such things went on. A young man tried it out with a young woman and then quit her perhaps, and she also perhaps tried several.
Neil went to the house where the school teacher boarded in Kansas City. The house was out near the edge of the city, so that Neil, in driving in to see his woman, did not have to pass through the city. The four people, he and the school teacher with the treasurer and his wife, sat for a time on the porch of the house.
On rainy nights they sat and played cards or talked, the treasurer of his affairs and Neil of farming. The treasurer was rather an intellectual man... “of the old sort,” Neil said. That kind could even be liberal, very liberal... in their minds, not in fact. If they knew that, after they went to bed, sometimes... on the porch of the house or inside, on a couch. “She sits on the edge of the
low porch and I kneel on the grass at the edge of the porch.... She is like a flower opening.”
She said to Neil, “I can’t begin to live and think and know what I want beyond a man until I have my man.” Red gathered that the little dark school teacher Neil had found was of some new world he himself wanted to get into. Neil’s letters about her... in spite of their being so very personal sometimes... Neil even tried to describe the feeling in his fingers when he touched her body, the warmth of her flesh, the sweetness of it to him. Red himself hungered with all his being to find such a woman for himself but never did. Neil’s letters made him also hungry for some relationship with life that was sensual and fleshly but beyond just flesh. Neil was trying to express that in the letters he wrote to his friend.
Red had had other men friends. Men had come to him, sometimes before, pouring themselves out to him. He thought, at the end, that he himself never did get a woman, not really.
There was Neil out there on the Kansas farm, or in the evening gone to town to see his woman. He seemed full of life, rich with life. He worked on his father’s farm. The father was getting old. He would die or retire presently and the farm would belong to Neil. It was a pleasant farm in a rich pleasant country. Farmers, such as Neil’s father had been and as Neil would be, didn’t make much money but they lived well. The father had managed to send Neil East to college where he had met Red Oliver. The two had played ball on the same college baseball team, Neil at second base and Red at short-stop. Oliver to Bradley to Smith. Zip! They had been a good double-play pair together.
Red had gone out to the Kansas farm and had stayed there for a few weeks. It was before Neil met the school teacher in the city.
Neil was a radical then. He had radical thoughts. Red had asked him once, “You are going to be a farmer, like your father?”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 141
