Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  “Yes.”

  “Would you give up ownership of this?” Red had asked. They were standing at the edge of a cornfield that day. Such magnificent corn they raised on that farm. Neil’s father kept cattle. He raised corn and put it in great cribs in the fall. Then he went West and bought steers which he brought to the farm to be fattened during the winter. The corn wasn’t hauled away from the farm to be sold but was fed to the cattle and the rich manure that accumulated all through the winter was then hauled out and spread over the land. “Would you give up ownership of all this?”

  “Yes, I guess,” Neil had said. He laughed, “It’s true they might have to take it from me,” he said.

  Even then Neil had got notions into his head. He wouldn’t, at that time, have called himself frankly a communist as he did afterwards in letters, under the influence of the woman.

  It wasn’t that he would have been afraid.

  But yes, he was afraid. Even after he met the school teacher and wrote the letters to Red, he was afraid of hurting his father and mother. Red did not blame him for that. He remembered Neil’s father and mother as good people, honest people, kind people. Neil had one sister, older than himself, who had married a young neighboring farmer. She was a big strong good woman like her mother and very fond of Neil and proud of him. When Red was in Kansas that summer she came once with her husband to spend the week-end at home and talked to Red of Neil. “I am glad he has been to college and is educated,” she said. She was also glad that her brother, in spite of his education, was willing to come back home and be a simple farmer like the rest of them. She thought Neil was smarter than all the rest of them, broader in his mind, she said.

  Neil said, speaking of the farm he would some day inherit, “Yes, I guess I’d give it up that way,” he said. “I think I am going to be a good farmer. I like farming.” He said that he dreamed of his father’s fields at night sometimes. “I am always planning and planning,” he said. What he would do with every field was planned, he said, years in advance. “I’d give it up because I can’t give it up,” he said. “Men can never go away from the land.” He meant that he intended to make of himself a very capable farmer. “What difference will it make to such men as myself if the land finally belongs to the state? They will need such men as I intend to make of myself.”

  There were other farmers in that neighborhood not so capable as he was. What difference did that make? “It would be glorious to spread myself out,” Neil said. “I wouldn’t ask any pay if they would let me do that. All I’d ask would be a living.”

  “They wouldn’t let you do it, though,” Red said.

  “And we’ll have to make them let us some day,” Neil answered. Neil was probably a communist then and didn’t quite know it.

  Evidently the woman he had found had made him know something. They had got at something together. Neil, in his letters about her and his relations with her, told of things they did. Sometimes the woman told lies to the treasurer and his wife with whom she lived. She told Neil that she wanted to spend the night with him.

  Then she got up a cock and bull story about going home for the night to her own Kansas town. She packed her bag and met Neil in the city, getting into his car, and they drove off to some town. They registered at the same little hotel as husband and wife. They had not married yet, Neil said, because they both wanted to be sure. “I don’t want it to make you feel like settling down and I don’t want to settle down myself,” she said to Neil. She was afraid he might become contented with being just a fairly prosperous Middle-Western farmer... no better than a merchant... no better than a banker or any money-hungry man, she said. She told Neil she had tried two other men before she came to him. “All the way?” he had asked her. “Sure,” she said. “If,” she said, “a man became absorbed just in the happiness of possessing a woman he loved, or she gave herself just to him and to having children...”

  She had become a sincere Red. She thought there was something beyond desire, but that you had to satisfy desire and understand and appreciate the wonders of desire first. You had to see whether or not it could conquer you, make you forget everything else.

  First, though, you had to find it sweet and know that it was sweet. If you could not bear the sweetness of it and go on, you were no good.

  There had to be exceptional people. The woman kept telling Neil that. She thought a new time had come. The world was waiting for new people, a new kind of people. She did not want Neil and herself to be big people. The world, she told him, wanted now big little people, plenty of them. There always had been such people, she said, but they had to begin to speak out now, to assert themselves.

  She gave herself to Neil and watched him and, Red gathered, he was doing something of the sort with her. Red got that out of Neil’s letters. They went off to little hotels to lie in each other’s arms. When their bodies were quiet they talked. “I guess we’ll marry,” Neil said in a letter to Red Oliver. “Why not?” he asked. He said people had to begin to prepare themselves. The revolution was coming. When it came it was going to demand strong and quiet people willing to work, not just noisy ill-prepared people. He thought that every woman ought to begin by finding her man, at any cost, and that every man ought to make the search for his woman.

  It was to be done in a new way, Neil thought, more fearlessly than the old way. The new men and women who had to begin to appear, if the world were ever to be made sweet again, had first of all to learn to be fearless and even reckless. They had to be life lovers who would throw even life itself into the game.

  *

  THE machinery in the cotton mill at Langdon, Georgia, made a low singing sound. Young Red Oliver was working there. All week the sound never stopped, night or day. At night the mill was brightly lighted. There was the town of Langdon above the little plateau on which the mill stood and it was a rather shabby town. It wasn’t shabby as it had been once, before the mill came, when Red Oliver was a small boy, but a boy hardly knows when a town is shabby.

  How is he to know? If he is a town boy, the town is his world. He has known no other world, has made no comparisons. Red Oliver had been a rather lonely lad. His father had been a doctor in Langdon and his grandfather before him had also been a doctor there, but Red’s father had not done very well. He had faded out, gone rather stale, when he was still a young man. At that time it wasn’t so difficult to become a doctor as it became later. Red’s father got through his studies and began his practice. He practiced with his father and lived with him. When the father died — doctors also die — he lived in the old doctor’s place, inherited it, a rather flamboyant old frame house with a wide porch in front. The porch was supported by tall wooden pillars made originally to look like stone. They did not look like stone in Red’s day. There were great cracks in the old wood and the house had long been unpainted. There was what in the South is called “a dog run” through the house and, standing in the street at front, you could, on a summer, spring or fall day, look directly through the house, and across hot still cotton fields to Georgia hills, seen in the distance.

  The old doctor had a small frame office in a corner of the yard near the street but it had been discarded as an office by the young doctor. He had got an office upstairs in one of the buildings on Main Street. Now the old office was overgrown by vines and had fallen into decay. It was unused and the door had been taken off. An old chair, with the bottom out, stood in there. You could see it from the street, sitting in there in the dusky light behind the vines.

  Red had come for the summer to Langdon from a school he had been attending in the North. He had known at school the young man Neil Bradley, who later wrote him the letters. He worked as a common laborer in the mill that summer.

  His father was dead, had died during the winter while Red was a freshman in the Northern college.

  At the time of his death Red’s father was no longer young. He had not married until he had reached middle life and then had married a nurse. It was said in the town, whispered about t
he town, that the woman the doctor had married, Red’s mother, was not from a very good family. She was from Atlanta and had come to Langdon, where she met Doctor Oliver, on an important case. At that time there were no trained nurses in Langdon. A man, the president of the local bank, the man who later became president of the Langdon Cotton Mill Company, at that time a young man, got seriously ill. The nurse was sent for and came. Doctor Oliver was on the case. It wasn’t his case but he had been called in consultation. There were only four doctors in the county then and they were all called.

  Doctor Oliver met the nurse and they got married. People of the town raised their eyebrows. “Was it necessary?” they asked. Evidently it was not. Young Red Oliver was not born until three years later. It turned out that he was to be the only child of the marriage. There were, however, rumors in the town. “She must have made him think it was necessary.” Such tales are whispered about the streets and in the houses in Southern towns as well as in the towns of the East, the Middle West and the Far West.

  There are always other whispers going about in streets and houses of Southern towns. A great deal is made of family. “What sort of family has she, or he?” There has never been much immigration into Southern States, into the old American slave States, as every one knows. Families have just gone on and on.

  A good many families have decayed, gone to pieces. In a surprising number of old Southern communities, where no industry has come in, as it came to Langdon and has come to many other Southern towns in the last twenty-five or thirty years, there are no men left. Very likely you will find, in such a family, no one left but two or three queer fussy old women. A few years ago they would have been talking constantly of Civil War days or of the days before the Civil War, the good old days when the South really was something. They would have told you tales of Northern generals who carried away their silver spoons and were in other ways brutal and cruel to them. That kind of old Southern woman has pretty much died out now. Those who are left live somewhere in town or in the country in an old house. It has once been a grand house, or at any rate a house that in the South in the old days was thought grand. There are wooden pillars supporting a porch across the front as at the front of the Oliver house. Two or three old women live there. No doubt, after the Civil War, much the same thing happened to the South that happened to New England. The more energetic young men lit out. After the Civil War the men in power in the North, the men who came into power with the death of Lincoln and after Andrew Johnson was got out of the way, were afraid of losing their power. They passed laws giving the vote to Negroes, expecting to control them. For a time they did control. There was a so-called reconstruction period, that was in reality a time of destruction more bitter even than the war years.

  But every one who has read about American history now knows about that. Nations have lives like people. It is perhaps best not to inquire too closely into most people’s lives. Even Andrew Johnson is now looked upon with favor by the historians. In Knoxville, Tennessee, where he was once hated and derided, there is now a big hotel named for him. He is no longer thought of as merely a drunken traitor, elected by accident and staggering through a few years as President until a real President could be named.

  In the South also, in spite of the rather amusing idea of Greek culture, no doubt taken up because both the Greek and the Southern cultures were founded upon slavery, a culture that, in the South, never flamed into art as in old Greece but remained merely an empty claim on the lips of certain solemn long-coated Southerners, and the notion of a peculiar chivalry, inherent in the Southerner, got probably, as Mark Twain once declared, from reading too much Sir Walter Scott... in spite of these things tongues wagged and do wag in the South. Little knife thrusts are made. It is a civilization, as suggested, where much emphasis is placed upon family, so that is a vulnerable point. “In such and such a family there is a touch of the tar pot.” Heads wagging.

  They had wagged over young Doctor Oliver and later over the middle-aged Doctor Oliver who suddenly married a nurse. There had been a certain colored woman, living alone in Langdon, who had insisted on having children. The younger Oliver was her doctor. He went often, over a period covering several years, to her house, a small cabin on a country road beyond the Oliver place. The Oliver house had once stood on the best street in Langdon. It was the last house before the cotton fields began, but later, after the cotton mill was built, after new people began to come in, after new buildings and new stores were put up on Main Street, the best people began building at another end of the town.

  The colored woman, a tall straight yellow woman with fine shoulders and an erect head, did no work. She was a Negro’s Negro, not a white man’s Negro, people said. She had once been married to a young Negro man but he had disappeared. She may have driven him off.

  The doctor went often to her little house. She did not work. She lived simply but she lived. The doctor’s car was occasionally seen standing in the road before her house even quite late at night.

  Was she ill? People smiled. Southerners do not much fancy talking of such things, particularly when there are outsiders about. Among themselves... “Well, you know.” Words passed about. One of the yellow woman’s children was almost white. That was a boy who disappeared later, after the time of which we are now writing, when Red Oliver was also a young boy. Of all of these earlier head-waggings, both male and female head-waggings, whispers on summer nights, the doctor seen driving out that way, even after he got himself a wife and had a son... of all these innuendoes, knife-thrusts against his father in the town of Langdon, Red Oliver knew nothing.

  Perhaps Doctor Oliver’s wife, Red’s mother, knew. She may have decided to say nothing. She had a brother in Atlanta who, in the year after she married Doctor Oliver, got into trouble. He was working in a bank and stole some money and lit out with a married woman. They got him later. His name and picture were in the Atlanta papers that circulated in Langdon. To be sure, the sister’s name was not mentioned. If Doctor Oliver saw the item he said nothing and she said nothing. She was by nature a rather silent woman and, after her marriage, became even more quiet and reserved.

  Then suddenly she began going regularly to church. She got converted. One evening, when Red was a high school boy, she went off alone to church. There was a revivalist in town, a Methodist revivalist. Red always remembered that evening.

  It was an evening in the late fall and Red was to graduate from the town high school the next spring. He was invited to a party that evening and was to escort a young woman. He dressed early and went for her. His relation with that particular young woman was a passing thing, never amounting to anything. His father was away from home. After his marriage, he had begun drinking.

  He was one of the sort of men who drink alone. He did not get helplessly drunk but having drunk until he was a little incoherent and inclined to stumble when he walked, he carried a bottle with him, taking drinks in secret, and often stayed in that condition for a week at a time. He had been, when younger, on the whole, a rather talkative man, careless about his dress, liked as a person but not too much respected as a doctor, a man of science... who, to be really successful should always perhaps be a trifle solemn in appearance and a trifle dull.. doctors, to be really successful, should adopt early in life a certain attitude toward laymen... they should appear always a bit mysterious, not talk too much... people like to be bullied a bit by doctors.... Doctor Oliver had not done these things. Let us say there was a case about which he was a bit mystified. He went to see a sick man or woman. He went in to her.

  When he came out there were the sick woman’s relatives. There was something wrong down inside. She was in pain and had a high fever. Her people were anxious and upset. Heaven knows what they hoped. They might have hoped she would get well and, on the other hand...

  No use going into that. People are people. They gathered about the doctor. “What is it, doctor? Will she get well? Is she very bad?”

  “Yes. Yes.” Doctor Oliver perhaps smiled. H
e was puzzled. “I don’t know what is wrong with the woman. How the devil am I to know?”

  Sometimes he even laughed in the very faces of the anxious people standing about. That was because he was slightly embarrassed. He was always laughing or frowning at the wrong moment. After he married and began to drink, he even sometimes giggled in the very presence of the sick people. He did not want to. The doctor wasn’t a fool. For example, when talking to laymen, he did not call diseases by the names commonly used by outsiders. He managed to remember names, even for the most common sort of diseases, every one did not know. There are always long difficult names, derived usually from Latin. He remembered them. He had got them at school.

  But even with Doctor Oliver there were certain people with whom he got along very well. He was understood by a few people in Langdon. After he grew more and more unsuccessful and was more often half drunk there were a few men and women who stuck to him. They were, however, likely to be very poor people and they were usually queer. There were even a few men and older women to whom he spoke of his own failure. “I’m no good. I don’t see why any one employs me,” he said. When he said it he tried to laugh but wasn’t successful. “Lord God Almighty, did you see that? I almost broke into tears. I am becoming sentimental about myself. I am getting full of self-pity,” he said to himself sometimes, when having been with some one with whom he felt sympathetic; he had in this way rather let go.

  On the evening when young Red Oliver, then a high school boy, went to the party, escorting a young high school girl, a pretty girl with a long slender young body.. she had soft blond hair and breasts just beginning to bud, breasts just seen, pushing out the soft clinging summer dress she wore... her hips were very slender, like a boy’s hips... on that evening he had come down out of his room upstairs in the Oliver house and there was his mother dressed all in black. He had never before seen her dressed like that. It was a new dress.