“But what am I doing here?” She did not know afterwards how long she stood thus, acting the part of a jack-the-peeper. There was a little hurt place in her throat. “What a fool I am,” she thought. There was a quick, rapid review of her own life, as factory and shop girl. Then as clerk in the five-and-ten; the coming of Gordon Halsey, her own cleverness in managing him, getting him into a marriage...
Her determination not to have a child by him...
Her hunger for expensive clothes, for fast cars to drive...
Her going into the work with Tom...
“What did I want? What have I always wanted?”
Inside the house, the woman stood by her stove. She was frying something in a pan and the young farm man was seated at the table watching. “They have just got a start. It may be he has worked hard and has got a little money. He has bought some land here.
“It may be she had a little money and could help him.” The scene was to Kit like some book she was reading, a story perhaps of simple lives, of simple people.
“Well, what about it, old woman?” the man said laughing. He got up and went over to his wife, also tall and strong-looking, and she began to threaten him with a long fork she held in her hand, but he paid no attention to the fork. Again, as in the cornfield, the man ran his big hand over the woman’s body until he came to the place where the unborn child lay and the woman suddenly turned and kissed him. He went back to his place at the table.
Kit went silently past the house and into the road. She had thrown away the little bag that had contained the clothes she now had on. She went along the road. It was not the same road she had followed on the day before when she had gone down in the town but like that road it led down and into a paved highway.
There was a filling-station on the highway and several cars stood parked before it. She approached. She had no definite plan. She could hear voices inside the filling-station and a thought came to her. She knew that many filling-stations along highways, in the time of prohibition, were also retail places for the sale of liquor. “This is one,” she thought. There was in her mind some idea of getting some one to drive her out of the country. “It would be absurd if now, after escaping from Kate’s house, after my foolish gesture in tearing that poster from the wall of the post office, I’d do something that would end in my being taken.”
She had a conviction she wouldn’t. She had got quite near the filling-station and stopped at the side of the road. There was a car standing near and in the dim light that came through the window of the filling-station she could see a man sitting in the car. He looked like a man of perhaps thirty, slight and well dressed. He was a young town man. “I must be quite near a town,” Kit thought. She was in an odd dreamlike state. She stood beside the road looking at the man who turned in the car seat and looked at her. The car was a light runabout with the top down.
As Kit stood thus, looking at the man who also looked at her, there was a loud roaring sound in the road and two motorcycles driven by men in officer’s uniforms came rapidly along the road and stopped at the filling-station. “There they are,” Kit thought. “They are after me. I am going to be taken.” The men had gone into the filling-station and Kit walked deliberately over to the car where the man sat.
“They are officers, aren’t they?” she said pointing and the man smiled and nodded his head.
“Why?” he asked.
Kit hesitated. “I might as well take a chance,” she thought. She knew that the taking of Tom Halsey’s crowd had created talk. It had been hailed as a great triumph for the prohibition forces. “Just the same such places as this filling-station go on,” she thought. There would be new men now supplying all such places. She was sure that the filling-station was in reality a speak-easy. She spoke rapidly to the man in the car, saying she had come to the filling-station to meet a man. “I don’t want to be recognized,” she said.
“If I could sit with you in your car until the officers go.”
“Get in,” he said, and Kit went quickly around the car and got into the seat beside the man. He would have the impression that she was some woman, perhaps from a nearby town, out to meet a lover, perhaps a married man of the town.
There had been a sudden real fright, seeing the officers at the place. “Is it a speak-easy?” she asked again pointing. “Yes,” he said.
He was very curious and sat facing her in the car seat.
“Will they raid the place?” she asked.
He said he didn’t think so. He laughed. “Let’s wait and see. They won’t disturb me. There’s a reason.”
There had been several cars parked before the filling-station and now men began coming out, getting into cars and driving away. One of the men called to the man with whom Kit sat. “Coming, Tom?” he asked and “No, not yet,” Kit’s newly acquired acquaintance answered.
Kit and the man sat there in the car and waited. “You were to meet a friend here, some man, eh?” the man asked. “What kind of looking car does he drive?”
“It’s a Packard,” Kit said, and the man laughed. “O, ho,” he said.
The officers had come out of the filling-station and had got their motorcycles that had been left leaning against the wall of the building. They were about to drive off and Kit was beginning to feel easy... there had been the sudden terror run through her after she got into the car. “They have made a bluff searching the place. They really wanted a drink,” Kit’s companion whispered and at that moment one of the officers put his motorcycle back against the building and walked over to the car. He had a flashlight in his hand and flashed it in her face and in the face of her new acquaintance. “Now I’m a goner,” Kit thought. She thought: “There isn’t an officer within two hundred miles that isn’t on the lookout for me.” It would be a real feather in the cap of some road cop to take her. She could in fancy see the headlines in newspapers... “Queen of the Rumrunners, taken by Officer Jones.” She suddenly began to swear softly and her companion looked at her in astonishment. “Well, what the hell?” he said.
There was the officer standing in the road before the car with the flashlight in his hand. “Oh, it’s you, Joel,” he said and turned away. The man of the filling-station came to his door. “Good night,” he called to the officer. He laughed. With a loud roar one of the officers, on his motorcycle went off along the road, but the other pushing his motorcycle came again toward the car in which Kit sat. “You oughtn’t to be hanging around places like this,” he said to the young man in the car.
“Oh, yeah,” Kit’s acquaintance said. He laughed. “You keep that flashlight out of my eyes.” He leaned out of the car. “Did you like your drink?” he asked, and “You go to hell, Tom,” the officer answered, preparing to mount his motorcycle.
“I hope you have a big evening. I wish you luck with her,” he called as he rode away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
KIT FELT THAT she had really got free. As the two officers rode away from the filling-station she thought... “that’s the last of it.” It couldn’t be possible that, after twice being almost in their clutches and they having missed, they would get her. “I won’t be around for them to get,” she told herself. It had been absurd, her hanging about. How amusing if the two who had just left were out looking for her. Her long experience with officers of the law, eluding them, out-thinking them, outrunning them on the road, had made her contemptuous. The man, in the car, who presently told her his name, spoke to her. “I don’t know why I think so but I’ve a hunch,” he said.... He seems a smiling alive man. The man of the filling-station stood but a few feet away.... Joel spoke in a low voice, quickly. “I’ve a hunch you’ve no liking for police.”
“No,” she said, and then added quickly, “Let’s get out of here.”
“O. K.,” he said and started the engine of his car. The man of the filling-station was coming toward them. He spoke... “That’s a hot pair,” he said, making a motion with his thumb. The sound of the two motorcycles could still be heard in the distance.<
br />
The filling-station man laughed.... “They’re after a woman.
“They couldn’t catch a cold,” he said. He stood beside the car and Joel shut off his motor. “What woman?” he asked.
The man explained. “It’s that woman... you know Joel, the good-looking dame, the one who ran the stuff for Tom Halsey.
“You know they got him, they shot him.” He was looking at Kit. “They say she’s hanging around. A farmer back here claims he saw her today. It’s probably a pipe. He says she was in the woods, back of young Hal Johnson’s place.” The light of the car was on his face and Kit thought... she was curiously cool... she smiled... she saw the man smile... “Oh, he’ll be all right,” she thought.
He was something She had been, and still was, one outside the law, beating the law, making his living by being outside the law. It would please him to see any officer of the law made into a fool. “Hello,” the man said, “I thought you came out here alone. I didn’t know you had a dame with you. Excuse me,” he added.
Kit’s new friend laughed. “She’s a friend of my sister’s. It’s Miss Hunter,” he said.
“Oh! Excuse me!” The man walked away, he was confused. He went into his little house and Kit was on the road with Joel. She had a new hunch. “I’m going to tell him,” she thought. “It was me they were after, at least I think it was. I was in the woods back there,” she said. There was a sudden outbreak of words. “I’ve got to get out of here. I want you to drive me!” Joel did not speak for a moment. He did not look at her.
“O. K.,” he said at last. They were driving along a paved road, going in the opposite direction from that taken by the officers. “This is rich,” he said. He became suddenly joyous. “God, this is good.” Kit thought he had been drinking. He spoke of that. “Look here, do you know who I am?” He drew the car to the side of the road and stopped. “I’m Judge Hanaford’s son. I’m his drunken son, no good,” he said.
Kit had never heard of Judge Hanaford, and Joel caught the puzzled look on her face. “You’ve never heard of him, eh?” he said; “well now, that would be a disappointment to him.”
For hours Kit drove Joel Hanaford’s car, stopping once at another filling-station into which he went to get a bottle of moon liquor, getting the money to pay for it from Kit. He had already told her that he had no money and that the car he was driving did not belong to him. It belonged to his sister, he explained and said that the sister was married to a doctor. He kept breaking into little spasms of laughter, wriggling in the car seat.
He broke into speech, telling Kit his story and stopping from time to time to drink from a bottle and Kit had a feeling that she might have known him for years, that he might have been some one to whom she had been close for a long time, “like an older brother,” she thought. She said something of the sort to him and he turned upon her. “Ouch!” he said and began explaining that he didn’t like the idea. “There are too many women take me that way,” he said. He sighed. “It’s my cross,” he said. Kit had got in with a queer one all right. Like young Weathersmythe, this one was a Virginian but he told Kit that he was not one of the first families. As they drove along in the night, Kit at the wheel, every turn of the car wheels taking her farther from the scene of her activities as “Queen of the Rumrunners,” herself feeling that she had seen the last of that life, trying to think a little into the future, Joel Hanaford sat beside her talking. Once she spoke to him about the drinking... he kept going back to the bottle... but he reassured her... “I know just how much to take,” he said, “how much will keep me comfortably stewed”... as they drove along thus he told his story.
Like Alfred Weathersmythe, Joel Hanaford was a Virginian, but he declared to Kit that they... the Hanafords... were not one of the so-called “proud Virginia families.”
“You don’t have to look up to us, woman,” he said. “No one has to look up to us.”
Kit got the story of the Hanaford family in little snatches as they drove, her own mind busy. It was to come back to her later, like something remembered out of a dream. She was obsessed for the time with a certain feeling — had been lonely and this new man, come upon so accidentally, seemed to break her loneliness. There was something about the man... she thought all of this out later... so friendly... he sitting there in the car beside her... as he drank he seemed to grow pale and he leaned back in the car seat, sometimes sitting with closed eyes. Once he was for a long time silent and his rather slight body leaned heavily against Kit’s and turning she saw his small head, covered with thick reddish brown hair, and his small tired-looking face.
She had a curious desire to run her fingers through his hair. She would have liked to take him into her arms and hold him. He was tired, something inside of him tired. She felt that.
He kept talking. His father was a judge. Like young Weathersmythe’s father, he had been a prosecuting attorney but, unlike the Weathersmythes the Hanafords had, Joel told Kit, no heroes in the family. There was a grandfather but he had not been a Mosby man.
He, the grandfather, had also been a soldier in the Civil War, but he had deserted. He had been a mountain man, poor and ignorant, and when, during the Civil War, he deserted from the Southern army he ran away and hid in the hills.
And then the war was over and he reappeared. He became a day laborer in the town in which his son was later to be first a prosecuting attorney and then a judge. Joel Hanaford seemed to Kit to tell the story of the Hanafords with a kind of bitter pleasure. It might well be, she thought afterwards, that he spent his life telling and retelling it.
It was a common enough story. The poor but worthy son of such a man as Joel described to Kit, determined to rise. He, Joel’s father, had worked his way through school and college. He had won the favor of the people of his community. “Look at him,” people said. Joel told Kit that he thought his father must have been the kind of boy and young man always being pointed out by mothers and fathers to other young men of his town, young men born into families that could offer their sons greater opportunities.
“Son, you look at John Hanaford. Look at what he has had to fight against and look at how he’s getting along.” John Hanaford, his son declared, had won all of the prizes, first at the town school, and then at college. He had done all the things such a young man should do, had peddled newspapers, to keep himself afloat while going through the town school, and later, at college, had waited on table in students’ boarding houses.
And he had got on, had become a successful lawyer, a successful politician, and had married into one of the so-called better families in his town.
“And so there he is,” Joel said to Kit. He talked quietly, continually smiling... Kit thought afterwards that it was a decidedly bitter smile... during the drive with him she was puzzled, and didn’t understand the man.... She did and she didn’t. She thought he did something rather fine to her.
There was the feeling of warm friendliness she got from him. There was no doubt he knew who she was. From the first moment with her she had the feeling that under no circumstances would he betray her.
He tried to explain why. Joel Hanaford had been brought up, had gone through boyhood, in the town where his father had made his struggle. “It wasn’t that Dad bragged about his rise in the world, not directly,” Joel said. When young Joel had got out of high school the World War had come on and he had gone into it. He had been wounded and gassed.
He had come home a wreck. “So there I was, in our house.” He had begun drinking. Kit gathered that things had gone all wrong between the father and son. He tried to tell her about that. While Joel had been in the army his father had become more and more successful. He had been prosecuting attorney in his Virginia county... always, as the son told Kit, sending men off to prison. Joel hated the notion. “I guess they think they have to do it. I wouldn’t. They get to like doing it.” There was a big cotton mill in the town and Joel’s father became attorney for that. He was made judge.
The son had come from the war a wrec
k and there was a political campaign on. There was a meeting being held in the town, speakers on the steps of the courthouse... this before the father became a judge.
The speaker had spoken of his own sacrifice, for his country, made by sending into the war his only son.
Joel’s father was making a speech. “I happened along,” Joel told Kit. There had been some reference on the part of the speaker... he was after the soldiers’ vote. “I gave my son to my country,” the father said.
Joel Hanaford sat up straight in the car seat. He trembled. He was trying to explain something to Kit. He was so excited that some of his excitement got into her and she stopped the car beside the road. He was trying to tell her of a sudden cold and deep disgust and wrath that had taken possession of him that day when he had stood in the crowd and listened to his father’s words. He had wanted to cry out but had kept silent and had walked away from the crowd and the speaker unnoticed.
He had gone home to his father’s house and had waited for his father’s coming. In all of the young man’s tale he did not mention his mother.
He had gone home and presently his father came and with him was another man. It was the owner of the cotton mill in the town. The mill man had got very rich during the war. The two men came to the door of the house and were met by the son. Kit understood that Joel’s one sister, the one who afterwards married the doctor and whose car she drove that night, was present. There had been a scene between the father and son.
“It is disgusting. It is revolting,” Joel had told his father, speaking of the speech on the courthouse steps and the father’s use of himself, now a half-physical wreck, for political purposes. Kit felt that she could see the scene at the door of the Virginia house. She imagined Joel as speaking quietly enough. “I’m a wreck. I can’t make my own living. I have to take your money.” The cotton-mill man was standing with his mouth open and listening. It was the influence of the mill man that later got Joel’s father his judgeship.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 206
