Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  It had turned cold during the night and there was the promise of snow in the air. There was a creek near the barn, and along it red sumac grew. Dave’s wife, his daughter Elvira, and the two younger children were standing and watching. Dave looked up and grunted at me.

  There was a fire still blazing under a kettle but Dave had the hog in the scalding barrel filled with the boiling water. I remember the hill beyond where Dave stood, the fall colors of the trees, the bare black trunks of trees beginning to show through, the two children dancing about. And Elvira, and her slim girlishness.

  “It will snow before the day is over,” I thought.

  How was I to begin on Dave? What would he think of my trying to interfere in one of his quarrels? Dave is a gruff one. He isn’t easy to handle.

  “Hello,” he said, looking up and growling at me. He had the hog by the legs and was turning it about in the barrel of hot water. A hog, when ready for killing, is heavy. . . .

  And then . . . it happened again.

  Young Jim came from among the sumac bushes with his gun in his hand. He had come up along the creek, beyond the barn, and he walked directly to Dave. His face was white. He had made up his mind to kill Dave openly there in the daytime.

  He went directly to Dave, and Dave stood for a moment, staring at him. I saw Elvira put her two hands over her eyes, and a little cry came from her lips. The wife ran toward Dave. Jim brought the gun to his shoulder.

  “Now! Now!” I said to myself. It was a kind of inner cry. I did not speak. The hands of Death were gripping my throat.

  But Death didn’t get Dave. I saw his big shoulders heave and, with a quick movement of his arms, he had the hog out of the barrel, but in doing so he fell. He and the hog were in a sprawling heap on the ground.

  So there he was. In falling he had upset the barrel of boiling water, and it came flooding over his body. He was on the ground, writhing in pain.

  All of this had happened more quickly than thought. The wife had been running toward her husband. She was still running. I saw Elvira take her hands from her eyes. Young Jim had thrown his gun to one side and had got his knife out of his pocket. I still stood helpless.

  “No, no,” I said to myself. For just a moment I thought, “He is going to kill the man with the knife,” but in the next moment I saw my mistake.

  Jim was on his knees beside Dave and was working furiously. He was cutting Dave’s clothes away, and Dave, who had been rolling on the ground and crying with pain, was now very quiet. I saw his eyes as they were watching the boy.

  And so Dave let the boy handle him like a child, and when we had got him into the house I rode Dave’s horse off to town for a doctor. I yelled with delight. I was beating the horse over the flanks with my hat. I had seen the look in Dave’s eyes as he lay on the ground, letting young Jim cut his clothing away, and I knew that the feud, that had begun between Dave and Jim’s father and that Jim had taken up in his turn, was over at last.

  HARRY BREAKS THROUGH

  WHEN THE DEPRESSION came to America in 1929, Harry was ready for it. He might be pounding the pavements in Chicago, trying to get hooked on, as an advertising writer, but he didn’t do much mourning. His son Jim kept slipping him twenties and seemed to have the gift of knowing when his father was down to his last dollar. Harry didn’t have to ask his son. He had two sons and three daughters, and once he said to Frank Blandin — he liked Frank but was doubtful about him— “You haven’t had your change of life yet, have you, Frank?” he said. Frank liked Harry and admired him but didn’t understand. Harry tried to explain. It was his notion that there was something peculiar about American life and American men. Harry worked for another advertising agency but used to come to Frank’s office to sit talking — this in the boom days in advertising, before the great depression. When he came, he was usually half spiffed. He was a fat, curiously awkward man, always knocking against the side of the door frame as he came in. When he went to sit in a chair, you were afraid he might miss it and fall to the floor.

  Harry was a great reader. He explained to Frank. “What else is there to do on the evenings when I am at home?” He was a married man and lived in a very respectable suburb. Early in life he had married a woman several years older than himself who was a devout Methodist. He had always stayed, outwardly, well hooked into the upper middle class and supported a pew for his family in a suburban church. Such a man had to spend at least three or four evenings a week at home. “What else is there to do but read, if you don’t want to go to the movies or listen in on the radio?” His life as an advertising writer had rather spoiled the radio for him. “I can see what we are coming to,” he said. “Pretty soon they’ll have all the novelists, all the poets, actors, etc., — to say nothing of the United States Senators — putting on evening talks, sponsored by somebody’s face cream or an automobile tire company, and we guys will have to write their speeches and the introductory spiels for them. ‘Senator Cowhide was a poor boy and has risen to his present great position in American life by his own efforts. Now he is chairman of the important Cucumber Committee of the United States Senate. The Senator is an extremely modest man. He says the opportunities of American life, not any special merit in himself, should be given credit for his rise to fame. He comes to you tonight through the courtesy of Soilless Wash Cloths. B-U-N-K talking from Chicago — the voice of the Future on the Air.’”

  Harry said to Frank, “Frank, you ought to read more of these books that explain American life.” He said there are a lot of good ones coming out. “It seems,” he continued, “that we Americans have been, from the beginning, a nation of dreamers. We got that way, according to these guys, because this was such a swell, big, rich continent when it first got opened up. So we all got the dream that we were all going to be rich. Ain’t that swell, Frank? The rich you and I have known are such great guys. They’re all so happy, too, eh? So we got this dream and it’s busted, but we can’t get over it and that makes us all children. Do you know what we’ve got, Frank? We’ve got a cultural lag.”

  “The hell we have,” said Frank.

  “Yes we have, and a lot of other things too. I’ve been reading them all up in these books — you know, nights at home. What the hell is a man to talk about to his wife, if she’s a Methodist and everything?

  “Yes, we go around like children, expecting we can all be happy or rich or gorgeously wicked, like some movie king or queen, or something, and when we get older we stay the same and so the country gets filled up with old boys — not with men. You see, Frank? . . .

  “We got to have a change of life, see? I’ve had mine.”

  Frank didn’t understand. He was a long time getting Harry’s slant. Sometimes the man would come in and get off something about his wife. Her name was Sue and Frank Blandin had never seen her. “Sue’s down with a bad cold,” Harry would say. “I’m fifty and she’s fifty-seven. She’s been a good Methodist now for fifty years and is sure of Heaven. Ain’t it nice, Frank? It won’t be long for the old girl now.”

  Harry told Frank that all of his children were respectable and good upstanding members of society except his one son Jim. Jim had studied law, and when he got into practice had managed to catch on as attorney for one of the Chicago gangs. It had feathered his nest, and as he hadn’t married — all the rest of Harry’s children had — the nest was the same one Harry lived in. “Ma,” said Harry, “ain’t onto Jim, but I am, and Jim knows I am, and it makes it more comfortable for us both at home.”

  There had been a time, Frank gathered from Harry’s talk, when the man had been all cut up about his son Jim. There were always shootings and killings going on between the various gangs in Chicago, and Jim was always in court and his name was always getting into the papers, — not that he ever did anything illegal — Jim was slick, they couldn’t pin anything on him — justice is justice — even the blackest criminal has a right to be heard.

  Just the same, his name was always being hooked up with such people. Jim could always squa
re it with his mother. She said she knew her son would never do anything wrong, or against Christianity, but Harry . . . At that time he was still prosperous. Once, he asked his son to quit it, and later he told Frank about that. “Come on. Quit it, Jim. Start to build up a real practice — say among business men. I can let you have any money you need. You got the brains, Jim. Why, you could be another Charles Evans Hughes.” But Jim had only given his father the laugh. “Don’t get into the deep water, Dad,” he said, “you might sink.”

  So Harry — he was forty-seven when it happened — passed through what he called his change of life. He decided to commit suicide. Later he told Frank about that. He didn’t tell everything. A part of it he just hinted at. There was a stenographer, a tall red-haired woman, Frank gathered. “O Love! O Romance!” he said. “She couldn’t see it and was my secretary, and I didn’t know whether to fire her or go jump in the lake.” So he went to walk, he said, all afternoon in the rain, over on the West Side — on Halstead Street — he said, and was silly and cried.

  It was in the early fall and the night was rainy. He had bought a big revolver and went home to his suburb and had dinner with his wife. His son Jim wasn’t at home.

  Then after dinner he slipped out, the revolver, all loaded, in his raincoat pocket.

  He said his suburb, where he had a big frame house — one of the best on one of the best streets — was pretty far out and you could get out into open prairie. He did. He said he floundered about, going across some cornfields in the mud, slipping and falling now and then. Frank understood about that. He thought Harry about the most awkward fat man he had ever seen.

  He had to climb over some barbed wire fences. He was trying to make for a creek, on the banks of which he was in the habit of walking alone, sometimes on Sunday afternoons, when he had got fed up on being at home alone, just with the wife, and that night he had got the notion into his head that if he walked in the paved roads, someone driving past in a car would suddenly stop, jump out of the car, take the loaded revolver away from him and perhaps even overpower him and take him back home or to jail.

  There would be an absurd article in the newspapers— “Harry Wells, a prominent Chicago advertising man, attempts suicide,” — something like that.

  So he floundered around in the mud, in the fields, always near paved roads, with cars going up and down, and got at last to the creek. It didn’t take long. The place to which he had got was near a big cement bridge, where a highway crossed the creek, and the bridge was only some fifty yards away from the spot where he came down to the creek. There was a sloping grassy bank there, all wet now. He sat down on the bank in the rain.

  His scheme, he told Frank Blandin, was to shoot himself in the head, at a moment when there were no cars in sight, and then, he figured, his body being round as it was, would roll down the slick, grassy bank into the creek, swollen now by the fall rains. The body would be found on the next day somewhere down stream, and there would be the bullet hole in the head. “Another gang murder. Harry Wells, the father of James K. Wells, well known as an attorney for the Smearcase Gang, meets a sudden and violent death.” It would set Jim to thinking and perhaps put his feet back onto the straight and narrow path.

  “It wasn’t that raw,” Harry said, telling about it; “no evangelical stuff, but you get the idea.

  “And I was wrong, too. Jim would only have shrugged his shoulders. He would have thought I had been reading novels or going to the movies and had got softened up.” You gathered, hearing Harry talk, that he was rather strong, at bottom, for his son Jim.

  As for that night, on the creek bank in the rain, near the bridge, he got all set and felt in his raincoat pocket for the revolver and it was gone. He had dropped it somewhere, perhaps in struggling through or over a barbed wire fence.

  So he sat and thought. He said he always did have a horror of cold water, and besides, that stuff about a gang killing would be all off if there were no evidence of violence.

  He decided to go on home, and perhaps try again some other night; but he couldn’t. He was sitting on the wet sloping bank and now he began to feel himself slipping. Fortunately, there were two small trees near by, trees with trunks about the size of fish poles, and as his raincoat was slick and he was every moment slipping more and more, he dropped flat on his back and threw out his hands. Luckily, his right hand got hold of the trunk of one of the little trees, and presently his left hand found the other.

  And there he was. The rain was pouring down — icy cold rain too, he said. Even if he had called out, the people driving by in cars might not have heard; but he didn’t call. He tried hauling himself up the bank, and then tried getting to his feet as he was but he couldn’t do it.

  “So I did some more thinking,” he said. He decided to turn over on his belly, and after a struggle, managed it, but even then he wasn’t clear. Every time he tried to creep up the bank, to get on his hands and knees and thus rise, his feet slipped or got tangled up in the tails of his raincoat. “I’d get part way up, you know — to my hands and knees, or maybe part way erect even — and then — thump! down I’d come, hitting on my belly. You see what it’s like — my belly, I mean. Every time, it knocked the wind out of me.”

  He said it happened to him a dozen times, and then, lying there like that — trying to get his breath back — the rain pouring down on him — respectable, solid people, very likely from his own suburb, scooting by him so nice and comfortable in their closed cars, going maybe to a restaurant for dinner or into town to the theatre, belonging maybe to the same church he and his wife did, so near him and yet so far away —

  He was pretty sure that presently, his fat, not overstrong hands — that had written so much advertising copy, “helping,” he said in telling about it, “thus to build up modern civilization,” — he was pretty sure that presently his hands would slip and down the bank into the creek he would go, like a fat pig into the scalding barrel. He said he couldn’t swim a stroke.

  He began to laugh. “It was my change of life,” he told Frank Blandin. “There’s where it happened, there on that creek bank, in the rain that night.” He said he did finally manage to get up the bank when his strength was about gone, and that then he marched straight down the broad highway home — mud and all, not giving a damn.

  He said his wife had a headache and had gone to her room upstairs and that he got on some dry clothes and went into the hallway to the door of her room and shouted through the door telling her he had got a long distance call and had to get into town and take a night train to Detroit.

  “But what are you laughing about, Harry?” she asked, but he didn’t answer. He got a train into town and went to a hotel and sent for some whiskey. “When you get your change of life fast like that, you got to have you a bracer,” he said. So he got one from a bell boy. He had put into his bag one of the books about American civilization, and what is wrong with it and why, and so he lay in the bed and had a good time drinking and reading and laughing.

  And after the depression came, he was still all right. He lost his job but there was Jim. Jim had an instinct for knowing when his Dad was close up to the wind, and slipped him a twenty, or maybe two or three. “For civilization, eh, Dad?” Jim would say, and he’d laugh and Harry would laugh.

  Harry kept trying, after the depression came, to get a job, but not too hard. Every day he went into town and walked around, and if there was an advertising men’s dinner, or something of that sort, there he was. He said that being among advertising men and hearing them talk and make speeches had got to be one of the great joys of his life.

  Or if he was on the street and some man, more down and out than he was, stopped him, saying “What about a piece of change, Mister?” he stopped and looked at the man and shook his head and laughed. “Not from me,” he said. “I’m not giving out the kind of change you need. What you need,” he said to the panhandlers on the Chicago streets, “is not the kind of change you’re talking about, but a change of life.”

&
nbsp; And then he had himself another laugh. He thought the laughs were coming to him, he having been a serious advertising man as long as he had.

  A MOONLIGHT WALK

  THE DOCTOR TOLD the story. He got very quiet, very serious in speaking of it. I knew him well, knew his wife and his daughter. He said that I must know of course that in his practice he came into intimate contact with a good many women. We had been speaking of the relations of men and women. He had been living through an experience that must come to a great many men.

  In the first place I should say, in speaking of the doctor, that he is a rather large, very strong and very handsome man. He had always lived in the country where I knew him. He was a doctor and his father had been a doctor in that country before him. I spent only one summer there but we became great friends. I went with him in his car to visit his patients, living here and there over a wide countryside, valleys, hills and plains. We were both fond of fishing and there were good trout streams in that country.

  And then besides there was something else we had in common. The doctor was a great reader and, as with all true book lovers, there were certain books, certain tales, he read over and over.

  “Do you know,” he said laughing, “I one time thought seriously of trying to become a writer. I couldn’t make it, found that when I took pen in hand I became dumb and self-conscious. I knew that Chekhov the Russian was a doctor.” He looked at me smiling. He had steady grey eyes and a big head on which grew thick curly hair, now turning a little grey.

  “You see, we doctors find out a good many things.” That I, of course, knew. What writer does not envy these country doctors the opportunity they have to enter houses, hear stories, stand with people in times of trouble? Oh the stories buried away in the houses, in lonely farm houses, in the houses of town people, the rich, the well-to-do, the poor, tales of love, of sacrifice and of envy, hatred too. There is, however, this consolation: the problem is never to find and know a little the people whose stories are interesting. There are too many stories. The great difficulty is to tell them.