Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  There were sometimes days when Red’s mother, a tall strong-looking woman with a long sad face, scarcely spoke to her son or to her husband. She had a certain air. It was as though she had said aloud, “Well, I have got into this. I came to this town, not expecting to stay here and I met this doctor. He was much older than I am. I married him.

  “My people may not be so much. I had a brother who got into trouble and went to prison. Now I have a son.

  “I have got into this and now I will do my job as best I can. I will try to stand on my own feet. I ask nothing of any one.”

  The yard of the Oliver house had a rather sandy soil and few things would grow in it, but after Doctor Oliver’s wife came there to live with him she was always trying to raise flowers. Every year she failed, but with the coming of a new year she tried again.

  The old Doctor Oliver had always belonged to the Presbyterian church in Langdon and although the younger one, Red’s father, never went to church, he would have called himself, if asked regarding his church connections, a Presbyterian.

  “Are you going out, Mother?” Red had asked her that evening, coming down from upstairs and seeing her dressed like that. “Yes,” she said, “I’m going to church.” She did not ask him to go with her, nor did she ask where he was going. She had seen him dressed as for an occasion. If she was curious she suppressed her curiosity.

  That evening she went alone to the Methodist church where the revival was going on. Red walked down past the church with the young woman he was taking to the party. She was a daughter of one of the so-called “real families” of town, a slender young woman and rather enticing, as has already been suggested. Red was excited, just being with her. He wasn’t in love and, in fact, was never with that young woman after that evening. However, he felt something within himself, a matter of little fleeting thoughts, half desires, awakening hungers. Afterwards, when he came back from college to work in the cotton mill in Langdon as a common laborer, after his father died and the fortunes of the Oliver family were at a low ebb, then Red would hardly have expected to be asked to escort that particular young woman to a party. She was, by chance, the daughter of the same man whose illness had brought his mother to Langdon, the same man who was later president of the Langdon Mill, where Red became a workman. He walked along with her that night, going to the party, having waited for a half hour on the steps before her father’s house while she did certain last-minute feminine primpings, and they passed the Methodist church where the revival meeting was being held. There was a preacher in there, a stranger in town, brought to town for the revival, a rather vulgar-looking man with a bald head and a large black mustache, and he had already begun to preach. He really shouted. The Methodists in Langdon did that. They shouted. “Like Negroes,” the girl he was with said to Red that evening. She did not say that. “Like niggers,” was what she said. “Listen to them,” she said. There was scorn in her voice. She did not go to the high school in Langdon but attended a young ladies’ seminary somewhere near Atlanta. She was at home on a visit because her mother had been ill. Red did not know why he had been asked to escort her to the party. He thought, “I suppose I might have asked Father to let me have his car.” He never had asked for it. The doctor’s car was a cheap one and was pretty old.

  White people in a little frame church on a side street listening to a preacher shout, “Get God, I tell you, you are lost unless you get God.

  “It is your chance. Don’t put it off.

  “You are miserable. If you haven’t got God you are lost. What are you getting out of life? Get God, I tell you.”

  The voice rang in Red’s ears that night. He always afterwards, for some obscure reason, remembered the little street of the Southern town and the walk toward the house where a party was being held on that evening he took the young woman to the party and afterwards escorted her home. He later remembered passing with relief out of the little street in which the Methodist church stood. On that evening there were no services being held in any other church in town. His own mother must have gone in there.

  Most of the Methodists, of that particular Methodist church in Langdon, were poor whites. People who worked in the cotton mill went to church there. There was no church in the cotton mill village itself, but the church stood on property belonging to the mill, although it lay outside the mill village and quite near the home of the mill president. The mill had contributed most of the money for the building of the church, but people of the town were quite free to go to it. The mill even paid half of the salary of the regular preacher. Red went past the church with the girl and through Main Street. People spoke to Red. Men he met bowed with rather over-elaborate ceremony to the young girl he was with.

  Red, already a tall boy and still growing fast then, had on a new hat and a new suit. He felt awkward and a little ashamed of something. This he remembered afterwards as being mixed in him with a feeling of being ashamed that he was ashamed. He kept passing people he knew. There was a man riding a mule under the bright lights through Main Street. “Hello, Red,” he called. “How absurd,” Red thought. “I don’t even know the man. I suppose it is some smarty who has seen me playing baseball.”

  He was shy and raised his hat to people shyly. His hair was fiery red and he had let it grow too long. “I should have got a hair cut,” he thought. There were large freckles on his nose and cheeks, such freckles as red-haired young men frequently have.

  Really Red was popular in the town, more popular than he knew. He was then on the high school baseball team, the best player on the team. He liked playing baseball but hated, as he always afterwards did, the fuss made about baseball by people who did not play. When he was playing baseball and had made a long hit, perhaps reaching third base, there would be people, commonly quiet enough people who would be running up and down the base lines and shouting. He stood on third base and men even came and slapped him on the shoulder. “The damn fools,” he thought. He liked the fuss being made over him and hated it too.

  Just as he liked being with that girl and at the same time would have liked not being with her. There was an uncomfortable feeling that really lasted all evening and until he had got her home from the party and safely in her own house. If a man could touch a girl like that. Red had at that time never done such a thing.

  Why had his mother suddenly taken it into her head to go to that church? The girl he was with had contempt for people who went to the church. “They shout like niggers, don’t they,” she had said. They did too. He could hear that preacher’s voice clear into Main Street. A boy was put into an odd position. He couldn’t have contempt for his own mother. It was queer her suddenly making up her mind to go to that church. Perhaps, he thought, she had merely gone out of curiosity or because she had suddenly become lonely.

  *

  SHE hadn’t. Red knew it later that evening. He had at last got that young woman home from the party. It was held at the house of a minor official of the mill, who also had sons and daughters in the town’s high school. Red took the young woman home and they stood together for a moment by the front door of the house of the man who had once been a banker and was now a prosperous mill president. It was the most imposing house in Langdon.

  There was a large yard, shaded by trees and planted with shrubs. The young woman he was with had really been pleased with him but he didn’t know that. She had thought he was the best-looking young man at the party. He was large and strong.

  She, however, was not serious about him. She had practiced on him a little, as young women do; even his embarrassment, being with her, was nice, she thought. She had used her eyes. There are certain little subtle things a young woman can do with her body. It is permitted. She knows how. You do not have to teach her the art.

  Red walked into the yard of her father’s house and stood with her for a moment trying to say good night. At last he got off an awkward speech. Her eyes were looking at him. They grew soft.

  “That’s nonsense. She wouldn’t be interested in me,” h
e thought. She wasn’t particularly interested. There was a way she stood, on the lower step of her father’s house, her head a little thrown back, then the head being lowered, her glance meeting his. The little undeveloped breasts stood forth. Red rubbed his trousers legs with his fingers. His hands were large and strong, they could grasp a baseball. They could put a sharp curve on the ball. He would have liked... with her... just then...

  No use of thinking that. “Good night. I had a hot time,” he said. What a word to have used! He hadn’t had a good time at all. He went home.

  He got home and had got into bed, when something happened. Although he did not know it, his father had not yet come home.

  Red had gone softly into the house and upstairs and had undressed, thinking of that girl. He never did think about her after that night. Afterwards other girls and women came to do to him what she had done. She hadn’t, at least not very consciously, intended to do anything to him.

  He was lying in bed and suddenly drew the fingers of his rather large hands together, making a fist. He squirmed in bed. “Jesus, I’d like... Who wouldn’t...”

  She was such a willowy, really undeveloped creature, that girl. A man could take such a one.

  “Suppose a man could make a woman of her. How is that done?

  “How absurd really. Who am I to call myself a man?” No doubt Red did not have any such definite thoughts as are here set down. He was lying in bed, rather tense, being male, being young, having been with the young female with the slim figure in the soft dress... the eyes that could suddenly become soft... the little hard breasts thrusting themselves forth.

  Red heard his mother’s voice. There had never been such a sound in the Oliver house. She was praying, making a little sobbing sound. Red heard words.

  Getting out of bed, he went softly to the stairs that led to the floor below, to the floor on which his father and mother slept. They had slept together down there ever since he could remember anything at all. Their doing so stopped after that night. Afterwards Red’s father slept, as he did, in a room upstairs. Whether or not his mother said to his father, after that night, “Go away. I do not want to sleep with you any more,” Red of course did not know.

  He went part way down the stairs and listened to the voice from below. There was no doubt it was his mother’s voice. She was crying, even sobbing. She was praying. Words came from her. The words ran through the quiet house. “He’s right. Life is as he says. A woman gets nothing. I won’t go on.

  “I don’t care what they say. I’ll join with them. They are my people.

  “God, You help me. Help me God. Jesus, You help me.”

  There was Red Oliver’s mother using such words. She had been to that church and had got religion.

  She had been ashamed to let them know at the church how much she was moved. Now she was safely at home in her own house. She knew her husband had not come home and did not know of Red’s arrival, had not heard him come in. As people do, when they are excited and religion has gripped them, she used words remembered from her girlhood in Atlanta, where, with her brothers, she had gone to Sunday School. “Jesus,” she said, in a low strained voice, “I know about You. They say You sat down with publicans and sinners. Sit down with me.”

  In reality there was something a little suggestive of niggers in the way Red’s mother talked so familiarly to God.

  “Come and sit here with me. I want You, Jesus.” The sentences were broken by groans and sobs. She kept it up a long time and her son sat in the darkness on the stairs and listened. He wasn’t particularly touched by her words and was even ashamed thinking, “If she wanted to get like that, why didn’t she go to the Presbyterians?” But over and above that feeling there was another. He was filled with boyish sorrow and forgot the young woman who, but a few minutes before, had absorbed his thoughts. He thought only of his mother, suddenly loving her. He would have liked to go to her.

  As Red sat bare-footed, in his pajamas, on the steps that night he heard his father’s car stop in the street before the house. He left the car like that every night, standing in the street. He came toward the house. Red could not see him in the darkness, but he could hear. The doctor was probably a little drunk. He stumbled on the steps that led up to the porch.

  If Red’s mother was to get religion she would be as she was about raising flowers in the sandy soil of the Olivers’ front yard. She might not get Jesus to come and sit with her as she demanded, but she would keep on trying. She was a determined woman. That was really the way it turned out. The revivalist preacher afterwards came to the house and prayed with her but when that happened Red had got out of the way. He had seen the man coming.

  That night he sat for long minutes in the darkness on the stairs, listening. Shivers ran through his body. His father opened the door that led in from the street and stood with the knob in his hand. He also listened; minutes seemed to pass more and more slowly. The husband must have been surprised and shocked as was the son. When he had opened the door partially a little light came in from the street. Red could see his father’s figure, dimly outlined down there. Then, after what seemed a long time, the door closed softly. He heard the low sound of his father’s feet on the porch. The doctor must have fallen when he tried to step down off the porch and into the yard. “God damn,” he said. Red heard the words very distinctly. His mother kept on with her prayers. He heard his father’s car start. He was going away somewhere for the night. “God, this is too much for me,” he was perhaps thinking. Red did not know about that. He sat listening for a time, his body trembling, and then the voice from his mother’s room grew silent. He went silently up the stairs again and into his own room and got into bed. His bare feet had made no sound. He did not think any more of the girl he had been with during the evening. He thought instead of his mother. There she was down there, alone, as he was. There was a queer tender feeling in him. He had never felt that way before. He really wanted to cry like a small child, but instead merely lay in the bed staring into the darkness of his room in the Oliver house.

  2

  RED OLIVER HAD got a new sympathy with his mother and perhaps a new understanding of her. Working that first time in the mill may have helped. His mother was, without doubt, rather looked down on by the people who were called “the best people” of Langdon and, after she got religion and joined the church to which the mill workers went, the shouting Methodists, the groaning Methodists, the Georgia Crackers who now worked in the mill and who lived in the rows of rather meaningless little houses on the lower plateau below the town, her stock did not go up.

  Red had begun work as a common laborer in the mill. When he went to the mill president, to apply for the job, the man had seemed pleased. “That’s right. Don’t be afraid to begin at the bottom,” he said. He called in the mill superintendent. “Give this young man a place,” he said. The superintendent protested a little. “But we do not need any men.”

  “I know. You find a place for him. You take him on.”

  The mill president got off a little speech. “After all, bear this in mind; he is, after all, a Southern boy.” The mill superintendent, a tall stoop-shouldered man who had come to Langdon from a New England state, did not quite catch the significance of that. He might even have been saying to himself, “Well, what of that?” Northern men coming into the South to live become fed-up on Southern talk. “He is a Southern boy. What the hell? What difference does that make? I am running a shop. A man is a man. He does his work to suit me or he does not. What do I give a damn who his parents were or where he was born?

  “In New England, where I came from, we do not say, ‘be careful of this tender little sprout. He is a New Englander.’

  “They do not get off that sort of thing in the Middle West either. ‘His grandfather was so and so or his grandmother was so and so.’

  “To hell with his grandfather or his grandmother.

  “You are asking me to get results. I notice that you Southerners, for all your big talk, want results. You
want profits. You be careful. Don’t you go throwing any of your Southern cousins or other poor relatives off on me.

  “If you want to employ them, keep them in your damn office here.”

  The superintendent of the Langdon shop, that time when Red first got a job there, may have been thinking something like that. As you, the reader, may have guessed, he said nothing of the sort aloud. He was a man with a rather impersonal face and filled with his own kind of enthusiasm. He loved machinery, loved it almost tenderly. There are a growing number of that sort of men in America.

  The man had eyes of a peculiar, rather faded blue, much like the blue of corn flowers that grow in masses beside country roads in many of our Middle-Western American states. When on duty in the mill he walked about with his long legs slightly bent and with his head thrust forward. He did not smile and never raised his voice. Afterwards, when Red had begun working in the mill, he was interested in the man and a bit frightened by him. You have seen a robin standing on a green lawn after rain. Watch him. His head is turned slightly to one side. Suddenly he hops forward. He has thrust his bill quickly into the soft ground. Out comes an angleworm.

  Did he hear the angleworm moving about down there, underneath the surface of the ground? It seems impossible.

  The angleworm is such a soft damp slithery thing. Perhaps the movements of the worm underground disturbed slightly some few grains of the surface soil.

  In the shop at Langdon the mill superintendent moved here and there. He was in one of the warehouses — now he was watching cotton being unloaded at the mill door — now in the spinning-room — now in the weaving-room. He was standing at a window that looked down toward the river that flowed below the mill. Suddenly his head turned. How like the robin he was now. He darted to some part of the room. Some minute part had gone a bit wrong in some machine. He knew. He flew there.