Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  She got out of the car and taking the boy by the hand, led him into a field. There was a rail fence but she did not climb over. She took the rails, one at a time, and threw them aside, being suddenly very strong, the boy standing dumbly to one side. The rails of the fence were something on which she could lay her hands. She gripped each rail, raised it over her head and hurled it from her, still cursing.

  They got into the field and walked a short distance along the bank of a little creek and something inside Kit began to get more quiet. She had hold of young Weathersmythe’s hand, leading him and he still kept muttering. “No. No,” he continued saying. As Kit grew quieter she noticed that there was a cut place on his head. In running through the wood, after the shooting, he had struck his head against a tree. She stopped and made him sit at the edge of the stream.

  There was, for Kit, one of those odd moments that come into all lives. She had been terribly excited and was filled with a feeling new to her. For the first time in her life she hated sincerely, wholly.

  “He has done this to this boy. He has worked on him, in some way induced him to do this thing.” She had no feeling of regret for the death of Wyagle. A useless brute had been snuffed out. She imagined Tom’s working, as he would have worked, on the mind of the boy, making him think the deed he was to do was something heroic. The boy was to prove himself to Tom as perhaps his grandfather, the Mosby man, had in his time proved his courage and the coldbloodedness that is also a part of war to himself and others.

  There was in fact a war on, a curious civil war, brought on by prohibition, Kit herself having joined up, the officers of the law, in spite of the fact that many of them were crooked, had sold out, were, after all, on the right side. Kit, sitting beside the boy in the field, at the stream’s edge that night... he had become ill and was lying on the ground beside her, very white now, his lips still muttering the words, “no, no”... she kept leaning forward and wetting a handkerchief in the stream... it seemed to her that her mind wandered... she recalled a story the boy beside her had told her... it concerned his grandfather and the Civil War...

  It was a story of Sheridan and the struggle in the valley of the Shenandoah. There had been some of Mosby’s men taken in a fight and they were pronounced outlaws by Sheridan. Some five or six of them were led out and shot and later, it was decided by Mosby that he would treat some of Sheridan’s men in the same way.

  “It is war. They have shot in cold blood five of our men. We will shoot five of theirs.” Young Weathersmythe had heard his grandfather tell the story... some forty or fifty of the Mosby men, with five prisoners getting off their horses at the edge of a wood. It was in the evening. The grandfather had told of the scene, the Mosby men having come out of a wood road. There was a falling field before them and in the distance, across the valley to the West from where the Mosby men stood beside their horses... the men had dismounted and stood at their horses’ heads.... In the distance the sun was going down. “The sky was as red as blood,” the grandfather had said.

  “You have to remember that the Mosby men were not regular troops,” young Weathersmythe had said to Kit that time he was telling her the story. He explained that they were irregular troops. They met. Word was sent to them to meet at some point, usually at night. They went on a raid and then, when they had returned from some such raids... they were in a surprising number of cases successful... their leader Mosby was a shrewd quiet man... as young Alfred had spoken to Kit of him she found herself confusing his figure, as described by the boy, with that of Tom Halsey... the same quiet ability to command men, to inspire fear in men, obedience in them.

  The Mosby men, on the particular evening with the prisoners. “We are going to kill them, shoot the bastards.” The grandfather had described the sun going down across the valley on that evening. Their leader Mosby was not with them and another man, with a major’s commission, was in command. He spoke to the men who had charge of the prisoners, pointing..., “March them out there,” and the prisoners were led out before the dismounted troops. “Well, who wants to do this job?” Silence among the Mosby men. Alfred Weathersmythe’s telling Kit the story long afterwards, his determination to make of his grandfather a hero.... “Not one of them wanted to do it.

  “It was a duty to be done. Would you have done it?”

  It was the boy asking Kit the question, in a hotel room at night, he looking up at her with troubled eyes. His grandfather had done the job. He had shouted to the men holding the prisoners to turn them loose and, as they ran down the falling field, had followed them on his horse, shooting them one by one. The boy, imaginative, questioning, making the scene as he told it very vivid in his own mind and in Kit’s mind. “He was doing his duty. He had the guts to do his duty.

  “They had shot some of Mosby’s men.

  “Would you have done it, Kit; could you have done it?” The boy in the hotel room, excited by his own tale, putting his head to his hands and muttering, “no, no.”

  He kept muttering the same words as he now lay beside Kit, her own mind confused, jumping back to another scene when a certain tubercular cotton-mill lad had lain beside her in another field, by another stream. She had sat, that time, holding the boy’s head while the blood flowed from him, coloring a stream. The boy now beside her was also bloody. The blood kept running from the cut place in his head. He was very ill. Suddenly he sat up and leaning forward vomited, and as suddenly, he arose.

  He stood for a moment looking down at Kit and then as though the sight of her was something terrible to him, he dashed away from her through the stream and ran away across fields and she sat quietly and let him run. On that night she had some vague notion that he would go to the law officers of some near-by town. He would tell what had happened. Kit sat on the grass in the field watching him run. She watched until he had disappeared. There was a wood beyond the field and she saw him run into that. She did not know afterwards how long she sat in the same place. “I saw him run,” she said. “He didn’t, as I thought he would, go to the officers. I don’t know where he went.

  “I never heard or saw any more of him,” she said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  GORDON HALSEY LAME to Kit in the hotel suite where she had once lived with him as his wife. He had two revolvers. He knocked and when she admitted him he came in and sank into a chair. He took an automatic revolver from his coat pocket and laid it on a little writing desk in a corner of the room. Then he took another from his trouser pocket and Kit broke into laughter.

  Why, how pale he was. Gordon had grown fat and he was much agitated. He began to scold about his father. “He wants me to bring you to him,” he said. What a funk he was in! He was angry. “What have I to do with all this?” He leaned forward in his chair and Kit noticed that his lips were trembling. He had been speaking in a whisper and had asked her to go lock the door and when she had done so... smiling... the terror that had so evidently taken possession of him affected her in two ways. She came and stood near him. When he had appeared at the door her first inclination had been to deny him admittance, tell him to get out, to stay out, but something, the curious look of terror in his eyes, had aroused her pity and that had been followed by amusement. For a moment he had been to her as he was, a little at least, before she had married him, a helpless child. He spoke in a loud whisper.

  He was telling her a tale. “And so they have also got to you?” she thought, standing and looking at him. He had been approached by a federal man, it might be by the same one who had, some weeks before, spoken to her. There had been hints thrown at him, questions asked. He told Kit that two men had come that very afternoon to his hotel room. There had been threats made, possibility of a term in prison hinted at.

  “For what? What do I know? What have I done?”

  “Why, you have done nothing. You never did anything,” Kit said.

  He began to beg Kit to go away with him. “I have it all fixed,” he said. He had got a car... not the big sports model car he had driven when he court
ed her but an old Ford. He had even left off his so sporty-looking English-cut clothes and was almost shabbily dressed in a worn suit. She wondered where he had got it. “He has had one of the bell boys here in the hotel get it for him,” she thought. The suit was old and worn and it had a curious shininess. It was one of the kind of second-hand suits sold to workingmen in little stores on side streets of industrial towns. “They mend them. They clean and press them,” she thought.

  What a fool he was! He had got also a shabby-looking car and had it parked somewhere in a side street. “And so, you have got money hidden away.” She knew her man. For years he had been getting money from Tom. He would have hidden much of it away, no doubt in safety deposit boxes in banks... not all in one town... she knew because in a small way she had done the same. He had put the idea into her head when they were first married, when there was at least something of a relationship between them. She stood before him as he talked... it was late in the day, a fall day and growing dark... and he was pleading with her. He wanted her to cut out with him, leave the country.

  “You really be my wife, Kit,” he pled. He began a long story, leaning forward in his chair, his face in his hands, looking not at her but at the floor, talking in a whisper, the two revolvers lying on the writing desk near her. It was true, he said, that he had done her wrong, had played around with other women, had lied to her. He began speaking of his boyhood, in the house with the woman Kate. What chance had he ever had?

  “I never had a mother,” he said. He was filled with self-pity. Kit went to sit in a chair by a window, saying nothing, letting him talk. She was both amused and hurt. “What a pitiful figure for any woman to call husband,” she thought. He said he had thought it all out. As to the business his father was in, he had had nothing to do with it.

  “You know that, Kit. You know it as well as I do.” There was something, to Kit, almost comical in the situation, his sitting here in the room with her, telling of the wrongs done him. He appealed to her, looking up from the floor. She had moved silently to the chair by the window and he turned his own chair to face her again but did not look directly at her. He had got suddenly lonely and afraid. It was the federal men and their talk with him that had started it all and now he had turned to Kit. “I’ll cut it all out, honest I will, Kit.” He meant his running about, sleeping with other women, paying them with money got from his father. He wanted her to go with him, at once, somewhere out into the West. They would buy a farm, a cattle ranch, he said. Kit gathered that the federal men, in their talk with him, had suggested an idea that had frightened him more than all the rest. The government had got a new technique. When it was difficult to get evidence against the leader or his better fixed lieutenants of one of the gangs that infested America all through the prohibition times, the government tried getting them on income tax evasion. They had already got several big shots on that charge.

  And what of Gordon Halsey? He had never made any income tax returns and all the time he had been getting large sums from his father. As he talked to Kit that evening, saying they would creep out of the hotel, one at a time... he told her where he had parked the shabby looking Ford... as for his other car... he owned and had been driving a Lincoln... the government, he said, could have it.

  The government men might be watching it. He had been very canny, had told them nothing. How were they to find out how much money he had and where he had it hidden? He and Kit would go away in the Ford. They would drive all night. He had cash enough with him to last them for weeks. When they got out West they could take new names. Although he had not treated Kit as he should have done he had really always loved her.

  “I thought you didn’t really have any respect for me,” he said, looking up at her, and instantly she had, for a passing moment, the thought that she would like to go to him, perhaps take him into her arms. He was after all nothing but a stupid boy. “I wonder,” she thought, as the impulse passed, “how many men are like him.”

  Could it be that all men were such silly children? Kit was in a curiously serious mood, had been in the same mood ever since the night when young Weathersmythe, under the influence of Tom, had killed Steve Wyagle. She had come back to her suite in the hotel in the Southern industrial town on the night after that had happened and had not left the suite since.

  She had had her meals brought to her room and twice... she was a little vague as to how long she had been there... she thought it might have been for a week but then immediately afterwards concluded it couldn’t have been for so long.

  There had been notes sent to her, two of them. They were brought by the waiter, a Negro man, who also brought her meals. They were on the tray under a dish. They told her to go at once to Kate but she had not gone. She had torn up the notes and smiled. Was Tom Halsey also becoming afraid?

  He had done that thing to her and to the boy, young Weathersmythe, had got her to come to that place, to watch him as he made the boy kill that man. Perhaps he had wanted to show her his power.

  He had been getting himself into what he thought a safe place. If there was too much inquiry made as to the death of Wyagle there was the boy, the actual killer, son of a prominent family in Virginia, the state where family meant so much. The killing had taken place in the state, in one of the border mountain counties.

  “They’d better not go too much into that.”

  It was evident that they hadn’t. There had been but a short newspaper item about the finding of a man’s body. If the old barn, in the clearing in the wood, near which the body had been found, had been used formerly by Tom’s crowd as a place to store liquor during its passage across the state there had been no liquor found when county officers went to inspect the body. The man Wyagle was almost unknown. No one in that county had ever before seen him. There were no large towns in the mountain county.

  A little item in the newspapers... a body found... evidently that of a stranger. The man had been shot to death but there were no guns found. It was presumed to be just another illicit liquor killing. The body was found by the man who owned the farm. “Yes, and he knew more than it would be comfortable for him to tell,” Kit thought as she read the item. She knew that Tom never stored liquor without first making arrangements. The farmer would have been paid to keep others off his place, keep an eye out. He wouldn’t be told too much. He would be paid for silence.

  He would have been afraid not to tell the officers of the county about the dead body found on his land. He would have been afraid to express any suspicions as to the killers.

  Kit had wondered, reading the notes telling her, commanding her, to report to Kate, if Tom had also grown afraid. It had been the purpose of the federal men, come into Tom’s territory, determined to break up his particular crowd... as long as prohibition lasted there would be such crowds... Kit knew that... if the federal men succeeded in breaking up Tom’s crowd, got Tom, another Tom and another crowd would take over the business.

  There was money in it, plenty of money to be made in the game. There was no evidence that prohibition had lessened the demand for liquor.

  Kit sat in her room, listening to the pleadings of Gordon, her husband... the thought that he was, at least legally, her husband amused and in a queer way hurt... not thinking of him... he went on pleading... he had got the idea into his head that they would run away somewhere together... go out West.... He would become a Westerner... out in the place where gals are gals and men are men... he had been reading Western magazines, going to the movies... already perhaps he had begun thinking of himself as a man made into a new man by getting on to a horse... she wondered if he had ever been on one... riding across open plains... talking with a Western drawl...

  She smiled, these thoughts flitting across her mind as Gordon talked on and on, pleading with her. Now he was boasting of his hidden wealth... now declaring his own innocence of any wrongdoing. “This income tax thing, Kit... it’s for earning, now ain’t it, it’s for what you earn, Kit. I haven’t ever earned anything. You know I haven’t.
” She wanted to tell him to go out of the room, not to bother her, but didn’t. He was too much the pitiful figure sitting there, pleading with her.

  Her mind ran away from him to his father and he kept on talking, his words sometimes not heard, sometimes mingled with her own thoughts.

  It was evening of the fall day and the lights in the room had not been turned on. She was in a grim mood. When the first of the notes, telling her to report to Kate, had been delivered... the Negro waiter saying nothing... the note left on a tray under a dish... she had been inclined to obey. After the shooting of Wyagle by the young Weathersmythe she had wanted to do something to Tom. She thought of going to the federal men, finding the man who had spoken to her, the leader of the federals, the man who had managed to stir up fear and uncertainty in Tom’s domain, of talking to him, at least of telling him about the killing. She couldn’t. How could she do that without involving Weathersmythe? There was no doubt that Tom was not only a capable leader of men, he was also smart. He had outsmarted her.

  And there was something else. She hated being disloyal. There still remained in her the feeling... the gang... Tom’s crowd... men she did not know... an organization... men like her own people, mountain men, poor whites like herself, had been enabled to buy clothes, live a bit more freely, make money. The privilege of making money, by almost any method, did mean something...

  Kit had no religion, no real friends, had never had a real lover. It was as though she had said to herself, “I have to be loyal to something.” This vague thing called “the crowd,”