Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  She ended by taking a room at the hotel... it was the sort of place used, as Kit later concluded, by sports of the town, a place of assignation really, where rooms could be had for fifty cents. She followed the fat man up a dirty stairway and into a room that looked down into the street, saying that she had walked a long way and that she had a sister ill at Columbus but was sure the man did not believe her story. He had concluded that she was a woman keeping an assignation and her man hadn’t appeared. Young women did not wear such clothes as she had on. “It’s all right,” he thought. “Her guy may show up.” At any rate she had money and could pay her way. He stood at the door of her room grinning at her, and then closed the door slowly and as though regretfully and went away.

  Kit stayed in the shabby room during that day and spent the night there and in the afternoon had another adventure. She began thinking of the woman Agnes, known long before in the cotton mill town, Agnes the radical. “I’ll write to her and I’ll go there,” she thought. She had some vague notion... “I have some money. I might get Agnes to go in with me.” She did not want to return, as a worker, to some cotton mill. “I’m through with the liquor business.” It wasn’t that she had any particular moral revulsion. It was the always hiding out, never knowing people. She might buy a farm. After all she had been a farm child. Why couldn’t she and some person like Agnes... Agnes was at least strong... “She’ll be wanting to change all the neighbors. She’ll be preaching to them about their rights... She’ll be always talking about politics,” Kit thought...

  Why shouldn’t she and Agnes work together on the land? Kit had money stowed away in safety deposit boxes in several Ohio and West Virginia banks. She was a little vague as to how much money there was.

  She went down into the street, this in the late afternoon, and, stopping in a drugstore, bought a writing tablet and some envelopes. She went to the post office. It was opposite a courthouse... the town was evidently a county seat... and there was a jail back of the courthouse.

  There were two men who had evidently been arrested by the county officers. They were being taken out of a car and led across the courthouse lawn. They were young fellows. “They’ll be mountain boys,” Kit thought. They might well be young mountain men who had been making liquor for the Halsey crowd, caught now... there would be some of Tom’s crowd, taken in the raid, who would buy their way through by giving names. There would be a general roundup. Kit had the odd, really absurd feeling that it was all outside herself, as though she were in an audience and saw a play going on in a theatre. She went into the post office and wrote the letter to Agnes, standing at a little desk and using the dirty sputtering pen she found lying there.

  It was late afternoon of the bright fall day. The clerk in the post office from whom Kit presently bought a stamp was a little old man with a small womanish face. He stood looking hard at her. Surely he also could see, looking directly at her thus, that she was not the little old farm woman her dress would indicate. There were two or three men standing in the post office and Kit looked quickly about. They had been talking together but the talk ceased and they also stared at her. A neatly dressed man... Kit had noticed that two of the fingers of one of his hands were gone... spoke to another man and passed out. She could see other men passing up and down the street outside. Now there were two men left in the place and in a moment they also went into the street.

  Kit had mailed her letter to Agnes... she never knew whether or not it reached its destination. She had decided to leave that part of the country, perhaps that evening, and had told Agnes to address her care of general delivery at Dayton, Ohio... it was another city she had often visited; she had delivered loads of liquor there... she had started to walk out of the post office when she noticed a poster on the wall.

  It was a poster concerning herself. It had been put up that day. There was a picture of herself, got no doubt from some newspaper, and a description. She was of such and such a height, always neatly and well dressed. Kit stood before the poster reading it. She had forgotten that she might be watched. A little shiver ran through her body as she read.

  So they had cooked that up. She was wanted. She was a dangerous and desperate woman. She was wanted for the shooting of the man Steve Wyagle.

  There had been some man, of Tom’s crowd... a quick thought came to her... it might have been her husband Gordon... he would be one to swear to anything to get himself out of trouble... they had thought that up... she was to be accused of the killing of Wyagle.

  A thought came to her. Would the young Weathersmythe also be involved? She reached up and tearing the poster from the wall rolled it into a tight roll and held it in her hand.

  She turned, stood a moment uncertainly, and there was the man, the post office clerk with a little old womanish face at his window and again staring at her. How long had he been there? Had he seen her tear down the poster?

  She went out of the post office and into the street. It was a bad moment. There was the courthouse opposite the post office and back of the courthouse the jail and there in the street, before her, was that man, the one with the two fingers gone from his right hand, and he was talking to two men who sat in a car at the curb.

  The two men were in uniform. They were highway police. Kit walked past them. She had in her hand the poster, rolled up, her hand gripping it. The man with the fingers missing was talking to the two men and one of them got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk. All of the men stopped talking together and stood looking at her. “So this is the way it happens,” she thought.

  It was such a silly business... If she hadn’t gone into the post office... “I wonder why I have stayed about here? I should have lit out, kept that car, highballed it out of the state.”

  The officers would have seen the poster in the post office. Perhaps one of them had just put it up. She walked past the men, her hand gripping tightly the roll of stiff paper.

  Nothing happened. She went on along the street and got into other streets of houses where people lived. It was a bright clear fall afternoon, and women were abroad. Two women stood by a fence talking and there was a boy in a yard raking leaves.

  Kit got out into the country and walked until she got into some low hills. The hunger in her had grown and she was in a sharp reaction from the fright in town so that for a time she was weak and trembling.

  “Oh, why was I not born into a different way of life? Why do I not now live in some comfortable house in a town, perhaps with children of my own? Why are some people born, sons and daughters of the rich or well-to-do, while others must spend lives in factories or in coal mining towns?” Kit had for the moment lost all desire for the adventurous life. She wanted only to disappear into the mass of people, no longer to be notorious, an adventuress. She sat on dry grass in a wood and looking suddenly down saw, still gripped in her right hand, the poster that pronounced her not only a breaker of laws, but a desperate woman, a killer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  IT WAS LATE afternoon of the following day, and Kit was again in the wood where she had changed her clothes. She had begun smoking during her life as a rumrunner and had an occasional cigarette. All day vague projects concerned with the life she was now to lead kept coming and going in her mind. It was true that the so-called Halsey gang was now broken up. Tom Halsey had got his. So all his plans... to make his pile, get out of it, begin another kind of life, have grandchildren, perhaps go to some city of the East, get into some “respectable” business, establish a family... all had ended by a stupid shot in the dark, a shot fired by his own son.

  The son was now in prison. He would be begging off. If the federal men, who had accomplished the breaking up of the Halsey crowd, wanted to go on... get Kit for example... there was no doubt they could get Gordon to swear to anything.

  She hadn’t shot Steve Wyagle. Young Weathersmythe had done that. She thought of the Virginia boy. If still alive he would be trembling in his shoes now.

  But after all, the only one who could bring him into
it was Kate. Kit had told Gordon nothing. Kate would tell the federal men nothing. Kit began walking up and down a woodland path. She lit a cigarette, took a few puffs and threw it away. It was a dry time and once one of her cigarettes, half burned, started a little fire among dry leaves which she put out with her foot. She was blue and discouraged, not because of fear that she would be taken, but because of the uncertainty as to her own future, what she was to do. “I may have money enough to live for a year or two but I can’t just sit still.” The thought came that she might go to some other part of the country, get into some other crowd, like Tom’s... they would take her on... she knew the game.

  “No!” She said the word aloud and was startled by the sound of her own voice in the quiet wood.

  There was a little sound, far off. Some one was coming through the wood. She put out her cigarette and went and got behind some bushes and presently a young man and woman came along a path.

  It was a pair of young lovers and Kit thought they might both be twenty-two or three. They were a young town couple and had driven a car out from town. It would be parked somewhere, at the other side of the wood. He was a neatly dressed young man... he might have been a clerk, and she a quite pretty young woman. They stopped near where Kit had concealed herself. She was behind a large tree where thick bushes grew.

  The young man was pleading with his sweetheart. “I can’t, darling, I can’t wait any longer.”

  He had her in his arms and was kissing her.

  “But we couldn’t. Oh, I wouldn’t dare.”

  “Yes, we could. It would be safe here.”

  After the adventure of the day before, when she had torn the poster from the post-office wall, she had walked about for two or three hours and then, when night came, had returned to the hotel near the railroad station. She had not slept or eaten since she had left Kate’s house. She was not hungry. She was not sleepy. She had spent the night in the hotel room and it had been a not too disagreeable night.

  The hotel proprietor had got that notion in his head. She was something fly. She had come there to meet some man.... Why else should any woman come to that particular hotel? He had been passing the word to men who came to to the place. They came to drink or to meet women. The hotel was the speak-easy of the town. The proprietor would be a man with a certain political pull.

  “Say, I say Jim, there’s something pretty swell up there in room eleven. It’s the front room at the head of the stairs.” (Life has many pleasant little phases.) A wink. “She came here to meet some guy and the guy got scared out and didn’t show up.

  “Gave me a line about going away on the evening train but I notice she didn’t go.

  “Jim, she’s got dough too, plenty of it.”

  Two or three men had come up the stairs during the night to try the door to Kit’s room, and there had been one, a drunken fellow, who had knocked loudly. “I say, kid, what about it? Are you in there? Say kid, what about opening up, having a drink with me, eh?”

  To be sure Kit hadn’t answered. The man had gone away. He was drunk. He went downstairs and sat in a chair. He went to sleep. Kit wasn’t frightened. She was too busy thinking. She had got her twenty-dollar bill changed when she had bought the stationery and at dawn she left the hotel and returned to the wood where she had left the clothes she had worn on the evening before when she went with Gordon to Kate’s house. At the desk in the hotel the next morning there was a young girl of twelve or thirteen and Kit thought her quite pretty.

  “And I owe also for a cup of coffee,” Kit said to her. How pretty and clean looking the child was. “Can she be the daughter of the man here?” Kit was asking herself. “God, what a break she’s going to get,” she thought.

  Kit crept away through the wood, leaving the lovers, something inside her hurting. T don’t want to know what happens.” How strange it was. It was so Gordon Halsey had talked to her, when she was a clerk in the five and ten.

  “I can’t wait. I can’t wait.”

  “The hell you can’t.” She had anyway been too slick for Gordon.

  She had got what she thought she wanted, a swell car to drive, clothes, money to spend. The young girl she had just seen in the wood with her lover... she had shiny black hair and a slender small body. “I wonder if she’ll have sense enough to stall him off, keep him hanging.

  “Or will she fall for his talk and, in the end, perhaps get sold out?”

  What a queer mixed-up thing life was, people always being driven here and there by forces they themselves couldn’t understand, some being hurt, sold-out by life, others apparently lifted up.

  There was the fixed idea... you must try to make something of yourself. The obvious way was to get money, by some method, get the things you wanted.

  “But what do I want?”

  Kit still had definitely the belief that she was not going to be taken, that she would get away. When she had got clear of the lovers, who were so absorbed that they had heard or seen nothing of her, she began thinking of getting away from the absurd disguise she was wearing. She had concealed her bag in the wood. I wonder if I could find it. She had put it in a hollow log.

  She began searching the wood, carefully, slowly, once almost walking directly into the pair of young lovers. The young man was walking along a path, apparently angry, and the young woman followed at his heels. She was crying. “So he’s trying that on her now, eh?”

  After a long search Kit found her bag and put into it the black dress. There was a gray travelling suit with a lightfitting little gray coat and she put them on.

  It was growing late in the afternoon and she walked down to where there was a young man at work in a field near the wood’s edge. Kit almost betrayed herself by walking into the man’s presence. She got down behind a fence.

  The man was cutting corn in the field. He was a stronglooking big-shouldered young fellow and worked rapidly, using a long knife he held in his right hand and gathering the heavy stalks into the crook of his arm. He was in faded blue overalls and was shocking the corn.

  Kit sat by the fence, out of sight, watching. Beyond the cornfield there was a small frame house, newly built, unpainted, and back of the house a tiny barn, also new, and presently, from the house... it had but one floor and could have but two or at the most three rooms... came a young woman.

  She was the wife of the young farmer in the field and was pregnant. Kit saw her come through a gate, near the house, and could hear her making her way through the still standing corn. She walked down one of the corn rows, the broad dry corn leaves making a sharp rustling sound as she brushed through.

  The young man in the field heard her approaching and stopped work. He stood waiting for her appearance. He had his back to Kit.

  It was all terribly important to Kit. She was in a certain mood. It was as it had been in town on the day before when she had seen the young mountain man being taken to jail. She was again as she was then. She was like one of the audience in a theatre, sitting and watching the progress of a play.

  The young woman had come into the open place near the wood’s edge where the corn had been cut and near where Kit was concealed.

  “Come on now,” she said to the man, “it’s enough for today.

  “It will be dark soon now. I’ve already started your supper.”

  The young man laughed. “O K., Bess. I’ll just tie up this shock.” He tied the shock and went over to her and for a moment they stood together, facing Kit. She was concealed behind a rail fence looking through between two lower rails. He began playing with her, rather awkwardly, shyly, and presently she saw one of his large hands creep down until it touched her rounded, distended body. She laughed and drew away from him and giving her a hearty slap on the buttock he went off toward the house followed by his wife.

  It was growing dark. Kit had stayed on in the wood. “I’m getting out of this country tonight,” she told herself. She continued smoking cigarettes, but as it grew darker, realized that the smoking was a mistake. She was walking up
and down in an open place back of the fence and could see over the top of the uncut corn to the little farmhouse.

  It stood on a little rise of land and beyond the house there was an old orchard. Kit could see what she took to be the foundation stones of another and larger house that must formerly have stood on the knoll. Although she did not know it the foundation stones were all that was left of a large house that had once been the home of a wealthy slave owner. It had been destroyed by a marching Northern army during the Civil War.

  The young man had gone into his little house with his wife, but presently came out followed by the wife and opened a gate that led into an orchard. A cow came through. “So they have got a cow.” Kit was remembering her own childhood in another little mountain house. She stood smoking another cigarette, absorbed, watching, and presently realized that she had been seen. The woman stood pointing and the man got up from his milking and also looked.

  Kit threw her cigarette away and went back into the wood but did not leave the place. She made her way by a circuitous route, night coming rapidly on, and approached the house.

  When she got to the little hill on which the house stood it was quite dark. She got to the barn and then, getting suddenly bolder went around the barn and got near the back door of the house. The woman was cooking the evening meal at a stove near the door and the man sat at a table waiting. The table was spread with a cheap but clean cloth and there were an open door and an open window. Kit went to within ten feet of the door and stood watching. She was in deep shadows. “It’s a good thing they do not keep a dog,” she thought.