“You’re purty now.”
His wanting, suddenly, perhaps the clean hardness, the youth in her then.
Slenderness, hard little upright breasts, straight little legs. Kit as a woman had slender ankles and long slender feet.
He stood looking, wanting no doubt to pounce, not daring, that other man, her father, the dark clean-looking one, with the swarthy skin, dark, almost black eyes, white teeth, just outside the house somewhere, within call.
Strange to look back to such a moment, for a woman like Kit, after what she became, men she had been with, hardness, knowledge of men coming — fighting through it all for something.
Not surely fighting afterward to keep what that man at that moment wanted, but for something else — not womanhood either.
“I want my story told. I’ll go anywhere with you. I’ve got money. I’ll pay my own way.
“I’ve been in the newspapers. I’ve been a notorious woman.
“You needn’t be afraid I’ll try to put anything over on you.
“Nights, if you’ll let me ride alone with you on this trip you say you’ve got to make, I’ll stay in a different hotel.
“If you try to put anything over on me it’ll spoil everything.
“I want my story told.”
Desire for something in Kit Brandon I thought then and still think, more akin to a thing I’ve oftener found in men than in women, as though to say — she never did say it to me — she wanted me to get it without saying — the sort of thing a man means when he says of another man, “Well, he’s a man, he’s my friend. The story you tell me of him may be true, okay. It makes no difference to me. To me he is a man and my friend.”
Kit, a woman when I knew her, who perhaps felt she had quite thrown something away, something about which there has always been much of man talk... oh thou Purity, innocence... meaning too often separation from the grim reality of living... at last a new generation in America throwing aside much of that, what is so often false. She spoke to me of a trial, herself up for trial, after she became a notorious rum runner, in the big days of the rum runners, during the prohibition era — a trial out of which she got six months in prison. “They tried to prove I couldn’t be believed, but every man they asked,” she said proudly, “every man they put on the stand, crooks and honest men, they all said the same. ‘When Kit Brandon tells you something it’s the truth’ they all said.”
The woman, in her talk, trying to reach back.
“I tried to run, that time, wanted to, but I couldn’t,” she said. “He came over to me, close. Stood there. I could feel his breath on me. I don’t know what would have happened, if we’d been somewhere, say up in the woods, just out of sight. I might have let him. I don’t know.
“He touched me again and that broke it. I didn’t have any more wood in my arms now.
“He put his hand, lightly, up on my shoulder again and then again ran it, his fingers down across one of my breasts. I turned and went out of the house. I didn’t tell any one.” It might have been, even then, that she had got that thing, so characteristic of her later.
“Goddam you, I’ll take my own part. You don’t need to bother to look, out for me.”
And afterwards, that night, and for several nights after that, while that big run of moon whiskey was being run off for the unknown big-town man who had contracted for it, Kit, barelegged, barefooted, in the cold, in the dark up there hidden in the bushes, near where the little road ran up into the big road, by the bare place, the bell with her — some rags to wind around her feet to keep them from freezing; the long dark hours of waiting and watching, her father, with the other men at work at the still — hurriedly, furiously working, that big man who had so touched her — her first — with them, smoking his cigar. “He got away with it, I let him. Maybe my father would have killed him,” she said.
“I’ll keep my eyes on that little gal. She’ll be ripe soon.”
He never got her. The long nights, half frozen up there, in that high altitude, days in the cornfield — the mother, that dirty slovenly one in the house down below.
“Getting ready to have another kid. I can’t remember whether or not she’d quit having them then.”
For ten years of my own life I had lived among the mountain people out of whom Kit Brandon had come. I had gone hunting with them, traded horses with them, been to weddings and deaths among them. I knew the Freys of East Tennessee and Kit’s mother was a Frey. I was curious about her leaving home, striking out for herself. Other women and girls I knew had gone out of the hills to work in cotton-mill towns, as Kit did, but they seldom went alone.
A family moved down out of the hills to such a town and, when there were several children, particularly girl children, the father often became what is known in Southern mill towns as “a mill daddy.” He put his wife and all of his daughters to work in the mill. You will see such men in any mill town. They are lost there. Such a man in the hills at least kept on the move.
He went off to work in some still. He worked, occasionally, in his corn patch. He took a bag of shelled corn on his shoulder and went to the mill to get meal. He set off on horsetrading expeditions or walked long miles, often over high mountain ridges to take a passel of ginseng root, dug up on some remote mountain, to the country cross-roads store, there to sit for an hour or two gossiping with other mountain men.
But, in a mill village —
Such a man, too old perhaps to work in a modern highspeed cotton or rayon mill, living in a little company house, in a company town.
These mountain men know nothing of helping a woman about the house, or tending a garden— “That’s woman’s work” — and in a mill town they are lost souls, wandering aimlessly about, sitting like Indians in the sun and perhaps gazing off, all day, toward the hills out of which they have come.
“Was it that way with you and your dad?” I asked Kit, speaking of all this out of my own knowledge, and, “No,” she said. She seemed reluctant to speak of her home leaving. “I was sixteen,” she said, and stopped. She began speaking of the year she spent as a mill hand, the big light room in which she worked, of a room foreman at that place and of an adventure she had with him.
Of her going on the night shift in the mill, and the feel of the mill at night. “I got over into the loom room.” Talk of the strange adventures of a young and good-looking girl, suddenly come down out of the quiet hills, to the crowded town, a strike she was in, the difficulty of learning to talk freely with people.
Of her hunger for the hills and the isolation of life in the hills. “I was glad to get over into the night shift. I couldn’t sleep at night.”
There were impressions remembered, fragments of adventures told about, in a cotton mill in Tennessee, later in a shoe factory in another town, sex adventures had, men who had tried, as she said, to put it over on her —
Married men and single men —
“Sometimes I let them get away with it, sometimes I didn’t.”
She had got her own kind of sophistication and had a theory I have heard expressed by others.
It was something about the life of women, the sort of modern women who are thrown out of homes into the world of the modern factory workers.
“It might go for any man or any woman, what I think.”
“But what do you think, Kit? What are you driving at?”
She found it hard to say. “I haven’t got any words for it.” There was a puzzled look in her gray-green eyes. During the time she was with me Kit did practically all of the driving and she was the best driver I ever rode with, could get more out of a car without hurting the car. Like many modern people, she had got the feel of machinery down into her veins, into all of her body.
She kept trying to say something and fell into long times of silence.
She had on the little jersey. “Do you mind leaving the window open?” This love of the open, even on cold raw days, perhaps something come up out of her childhood in a mountain cabin, where doors are always left op
en winter and summer. Kit said, “I went barefoot, winter and summer, until I was sixteen.” She went barefoot all day, out of doors, when she was a child at home, and to school — often when there was deep snow in the mountains. Sitting in there, barefooted, barelegged, on a hard bench without a back — great cracks in the floor, and between the logs of which the schoolhouse was built.
The teacher, a man, had on boots and he, she said, was always chewing tobacco and spitting into a little box beside his desk.
Snow drifting through the cracks between walls, bitter cold winds sucking up through the cracks of the floor.
Kit, in the car, as I sat looking at her profile had extraordinarily good features. The nose, mouth and chin were all cleanly drawn and she had a high white forehead. Her hair was blue-black.
She was trying to tell me. “I’ve often thought. It’s good sometimes to tell everything.”
Men can be beasts and so can women, too.
I’m not trying to reproduce her exact words. I can’t.
You can go through any possible experience. A dog rolls in offal sometimes.
It doesn’t change him.
She evidently wanted to say that she thought she had been something when she started life and that she was the same after the experiences she had been through.
Being a factory girl, then a clerk in a store, in a city — it was a five-and-ten-cent store, she said — then her marriage into a famous family of bootleggers in a certain Southern industrial town, her becoming, herself, first a little bootlegger, then a big one.
Her becoming a notorious woman rumrunner... this during prohibition, of course... men met, some, she frankly said, even lain with.
“Not a one of them has ever touched me yet.”
“You mean you kept something?”
“Yes.”
“You think you’ve still got it to give?”
She turned and stared at me, a peculiar long stare she had — like the stare of a gipsy woman, or of many mountain women of the American Southern Highlands. Then she smiled.
“I reckon you ain’t trying to start nothing?” she asked, and “No,” I said. I perhaps knew it would do me no good.
“Yes, I think I’ve got it,” she said.
She had... I finally got the notion out of her broken remarks... the idea... it certainly isn’t an American notion... I have known a few Europeans and particularly Russians and a Turk who had the same notion....
“You mean, it’s best sometimes to throw everything away. Is that what you’re driving at, Kit?”
“Yes, something like that.”
I was trying to help her say what I thought she was trying to say.
“You think all people have, well, let’s say meanness, lowness in them?”
“Yes. Sometimes, after I’d got into the newspapers, was what you call notorious — sometimes when I was in jail, other women came to see me.
“They were what is called respectable women.
“There was one I remember... a young one... she was a good looker... she was the daughter of a man who owned a factory in the town where they had jailed me. Her father, a rich man, was the superintendent of the Presbyterian Sunday School there.
“She managed, some way, to get into the jail and into my cell.
“It was winter and she wore very beautiful furs.
“You have to remember,” Kit said, “that, at the time, I was being played up a good deal in the newspapers.
“I had driven a high-powered car, several times, at seventy miles an hour, right through the business streets of that town, the law after me.
“She had on the nicest pair of shoes I ever saw on a woman’s feet,” said Kit. “She was a good-looker okay.” A little blush came on Kit’s cheeks as she talked. “What the hell,” she said. The newspapers had been playing her up. “They had told all sorts of yarns. They had said I had diamonds set in my teeth.”
The woman, that young woman, daughter of the town’s rich man, of the factory owner, Sunday School superintendent... “oh, she was so very, very respectable....
“She was a virgin, she told me so,” Kit said.
She wanted Kit to take her in.
“What?”
“Yes. I was in the cell there in the jail. There was another cell near by and they had thrown some drunken Negroes in there.
“They kept swearing, the kind of filthy words men say at such times — strings of them.
“It was a kind of howling profanity,” Kit said, “but not any worse than the police can sling out, I’ll tell you that.
“By that time I’d heard plenty of it.”
She said that when the young woman, so richly clad, came in there to her at night she had been brought by a young son of the jailer....
“He came to the door of the cell two or three times.” Kit said that he, the jailer’s son, was nervous.
“I understood her all right,” Kit said. “She was like me. She was a good kid.”
“You mean she liked it, wanted it, what she had heard of your life at that time?”
“Yes. The third time, he — the jailer’s son — came to the cell door and called to her to come out, to leave me, she swore at him. “Get the hell out of here,” she said. “Goddam you, you let us alone.”
“You mean, do you, she wanted, or thought she wanted, the kind of life you had, or that she thought you had, because her own life was too dull?”
“Not just that. Not just the dullness,” said Kit.
She meant, obviously Kit was trying to say, that she thought it was better for all people, if they had it in them... she thought almost everybody did... to be sometime in life openly, even publicly, low. I was curious, questioning her.
“You mean,” I asked, “that if you want to kill some one it’s better to go and do it than to go around with killing in your heart?”
“Yes, to do that or any other low or mean thing,” she said.
“Right out publicly before all the world, you mean?”
She seemed to have the notion... it was a kind of philosophy she had built for herself out of her experience.
“We’re low and we’re high. It’s better to feel everything you can feel — throw it away.”
I remembered, as Kit talked, a conversation I had once had with a famous artist, a painter. “A man can’t really paint unless he can also be an utter skunk,” the painter had said.
“You mean that the woman who came to you, the rich young woman, a virgin... she didn’t care about that.
“You mean she would have gone through with it, taken on your kind of life?”
“She would have done it gladly,” Kit said. “Some will and some won’t. They haven’t the guts.”
“And there is something gained by it?”
“Yes,” said Kit.
She said that, as regards herself, she had always kept something clear, and could keep it, she said, “in spite of hell and high water.”
I gathered, however, that she hadn’t encouraged the woman who had wanted to go away with her, to become a part of what she had heard of Kit’s life. She had found her own life in the house of the respectable man, her father, too dull and false.
“But you didn’t take her?” I said.
“I didn’t. What I’m talking about, you can’t do with any one else.”
It was a spring day on the Brandon mountain farm and Kit was with her father in an upland field planting corn. It was on a day when the little leaves on the trees in the wood beside the field where she and her father were at work were just beginning to uncurl. The country of the Brandons — and also out of which came the Boones, the Lincolns and many other sturdy American figures — is very beautiful. Recently, within the last generation, it — the Southern Highland — has come elbowing its way into America’s consciousness. There is the TVA with headquarters at Knoxville, paved roads are being built through the hills and up mountain hollows, figures of mountain men and women walk through the pages of our literature. “They are a brave people.”
“They are undernourished, dangerous, courteous, killers, chicken thieves,” this and that.
They are people and in spite of all yet done of road building, power dam building by government, town building by government, they are an isolated people.
There are but few rich valleys and the rest of the hill country covering parts of several states is wild, and often forbidding, without roads.
Formerly the whole region — a little isolated empire in the heart of America — was covered with hardwood forests.
The great lumber companies came, the coal companies, ripping out the timber, ripping out the coal. The big companies left a wild country more wild. There are deserted mining and lumber towns, denuded hills, once covered by majestic timber, the soil now washing away with every rain, clear streams made muddy, the hills every year growing more and more bare — an old old story in America now. “We are after the money. Let the land and the people of the land go to hell.”
The native people stayed on in little coves, in upland hollows — always the little cabin, often without a floor, with but one room — the Brandon cabin was of that sort.
Planting a little corn, doing a little hunting, loafing a lot — men and women living this sort of life. Some of the families, English, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, have been in the hills since before the Revolutionary War.
Life, modern life, with its high-powered swift machines, new comforts, in clothes, houses, food — all of the modern conveniences of life — these passing on by.
The language, words coming straight down out of Elizabethan England; songs — low-keyed, always sad and wistful.
Kit Brandon, when she was telling her story to me — often broke into one of these low-keyed songs.
Her father had made himself a piece of new ground. If you know the Blue Ridge mountain country, the Southern Appalachians, you know also what that means. You work a piece of new ground, brush-grown — angle of thirty, or even forty-five degrees — plow it, cultivate your corn, hoe it, and after a year or two of this, there’s no ground left.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 177
