“Come in, boy. Dry yourself a little. Warm yourself by my fire.” She had baked a pie or had made cookies and she gave me some. She was quite small and, as I stood by her kitchen stove, she came and put a thin old arm about my shoulders. “It is good to be young, to have your life before you,” she said. She smiled at me and lights danced in her old eyes. “I am sure you will be a fine man. I feel it. I am sure of it,” she added and I drank in her words. When I left her house on winter nights I found myself running joyously along through the dark night streets of our little town and when I put my hand into my coat pocket I found that, while her arm was about my shoulder, she had slipped several more cookies into my pocket.
She died and she had put my name into her will. How proud I was. She had left her house and its furnishings to a son, a mechanic living in some distant city, but the vacant lot, beside her house, in which grew the gnarled old apple trees, she had left to me.
It was a gesture. It was because my daily visits to her house had broken her loneliness. It was because, after she was gone, she wanted me to remember and think of her. It was, to me, a matter of magnificent importance. There was this will, to be probated in our court. I had got the word “probated” from a lawyer of the town to whom I also delivered a daily newspaper. My name would be read out. I would be called upon to sign a paper. I walked about the streets with my chest thrown out.
And there was something else. I had become a land owner, a landed proprietor. I took some of my boy friends to see my lot. There was a particular boy, the son of a grocer. “You see, Herman, your father may own a store but what do you own?” It was fall and there were a few small gnarled apples on the old apple trees and scattered about among tall weeds. I grew generous. “Help yourself, Herman. Put some in your pocket. It’s all right with me.” I filled my own pockets and took my apples home, demanding that mother make me a pie, and, when it was made, I stood over it, handing out small wedges to my brothers and sisters. This was not a family affair. It was my pie, made from the apples of my own trees that grew on my own land. How gloriously generous I had become. To be thus generous with my own property was a new and sweet feeling to me.
I took my brothers with me to see my lot but they were scornful. “Ah, it is nothing,” one of them said. “Such old, no-good trees.
“And look, at the back there, where it goes down to the creek. It is all wet back there. It is a swamp.”
It was something I could not stand. One of my brothers and I fought. We stood under one of my apple trees and I pummelled him while a still younger brother, little more than a babe, stood on the sidewalk before my lot and cried.
It was better with my sister who was two years older than myself and, I thought, a very sensible person. She had understanding. She praised my lot. “What fine trees,” she said. “Look, the ground must be very rich. How tall the weeds have grown.”
In our family we had always been moving. We went from one small frame house in the town to another. There were six of us and no two of us had been born in the same house. Perhaps we moved whenever the rent became too much overdue. I can’t be sure of that.
But now I had got this piece of land and, presently, I would build a house on it, such a magnificent house. What a joy it would be to our mother. My sister and I spent hours, walking up and down through tall weeds, making our plans. “You just wait, sister. You’ll see. I shall grow rich.” In a town some fifty miles away oil had recently been struck. “Who knows? There may be oil down here, under this very spot on which I stand.”
In a stationery store of the town I had bought a magazine devoted to house plans and I took it home. To avoid my brothers, who continued scornful (“It is just pure jealousy,” I told my sister), my sister and I went upstairs into a bedroom of our house. We sat on the edge of the bed.
What plans we made. Our house continued to grow and grow. Every day we added more rooms. My sister, from time to time, began to feel, I thought, too much a co-owner and I had to rebuke her a little. It was all right for her to make suggestions but all decisions were to be left to me. I made that quite clear to her.
And then it happened. The dream faded. It blew up.
It was the same small town lawyer who had given me the word “probate” who blew it up.
“You look here, kid,” he one day said to me, “about that lot that old woman left you.
“I’ve been looking it up,” he said. He explained to me that the unpaid taxes on my lot amounted to about four times what it was worth.
“I guess you don’t want to prove up on it,” he said but I could not answer him. I ran away. He had his office upstairs over a shoe store in our town and I ran quickly down the stairs and through an alleyway back of stores and along residence streets until I got out into the country.
It was in the spring, on a morning in the spring, when the lawyer gave me the dreadful news and I had my morning papers to distribute but, on that morning, I did not finish delivering the papers. At the edge of town I threw them angrily into a creek. I ran into a wood.
But who can understand the sadness of a boy? I was there in that wood, not far from our town. For a time I cried and then I grew angry. So there was a thing called “taxes.” You had a vacant lot given you, a fine lot, I thought, with grand trees growing on it. You had it and then you had it not. Some mysterious force you didn’t understand reached down and took it away from you. You had to pay these taxes. But where would you get the money for that?
I began to blame the town in which I lived. I would leave it, I decided. If I went home there would be my brothers and when they found out that the lot that had been mine wasn’t really mine they would laugh at me.
I stayed in the wood all that day, did not go to school. I made plans. When night came I would go into town and get on a train. There was a local freight that passed through town in the early evening and I would crawl into a box car and, after a time, when the town realized that I was gone for good it would be sorry. I think that, at the time all this happened to me, I must have been reading Huckleberry Finn. For some obscure reason I decided I would go to Cairo, Illinois. I would be a bootblack on the streets there. Then I would become a steamboat captain, grow rich, return to my Ohio town a rich man, pay up the taxes on my lot, build on it a magnificent house.
I was very resolute, very determined but, in the late after-noon, it began to rain and I decided that, after all, I would put off fleeing from the town for a day or two. There were things I had to attend to. I had bought a bicycle and was paying for it on the installment plan and it was almost paid for. I would have to sell that, make myself a bootblacking outfit.
When night came I crept into town. I had begun a little to get my courage back. I went to the railroad station and there were my evening papers, in their bundle, lying against the closed door of the express office.
I had to think up an explanation of why some of my customers had not got their morning paper. That occupied my mind and also I had to think up things to say to my brothers. I ran along in the rain, distributing my papers, and when I had got into a dark residence street began talking aloud. I was making up speeches for my brothers.
“Ah, go on. Shut up. Anyway no one ever put your name in a will,” I would say.
When I had got my papers delivered I could not resist going for a visit to my lot. I went and the street in which my lot stood was dark. The little frame house in which my old woman had lived was dark. Her son, the mechanic, had taken the furniture away. I stood for a time in the tall weeds, wet now by the rain, and was inclined to cry again and then, although I was frightened by the thought of the empty house, I went to the rear, to the kitchen door where, when she was alive, there had always been, on such rainy nights, a light in the window for me.
I did not stay there long. I ran away. For a time as I ran in a small town residence street in the rain I cried again and then I stopped crying. I remembered what I had planned to say to my brothers. It may be that just having said the words aloud had brought a dim rea
lization of something that, as I grew older, would become more and more important to me. There was, after all, the fact that I had been mentioned in my old woman’s will. Even after she had gone she had made the gesture of love and friendship to me.
THE PERSISTENT LIAR
FRED SAID THAT he was fairly caught and for a moment did not know what to do.
“I came into the bedroom that night in my dressing gown and there was my wife standing by the little table and there, before her on the table, was the note from Mabel.
“I had put it down there an hour before, when I came in. How careless of me. I thought my wife had gone to the movies. Ann, our colored maid, said she had gone out.
“I had dined downtown. I had got Mabel’s note at the office. We had quarreled and she wanted to make it up. It was one of those things a man does. I had reached the age of forty.
“You know, of course, that my wife Carrie and I have no children. You have been at our house.
“Did I ever tell you how we happened to marry? You see, we had spent a night together in a tree.
“Now do not laugh. It’s a fact.
“That was when I was living in the town of Keokuk. I had a job there and had met the woman who became my wife.
“So on Sundays we used to stroll about. We were walking on a Sunday afternoon in a little grove. My wife Carrie had always been very strait-laced. She had always been very religious, very strict about any sort of moral stepping aside. Would you believe it, on the Sunday of which I am now speaking and when I had been courting her for months, I’d never even kissed her.
“I had tried three or four times but without success. She struggled, she fought me.
“‘No, No,’ she cried. ‘I won’t. I won’t. I don’t think it nice.’”
“As you may guess it was all terribly annoying to me. You know how I am. I am a man who must have women. Women are the very breath of my nostrils, that is to say, in a way of speaking. If I can’t get one I go after another.
“For example just at that time, when I was going with my wife, she was pretty thin, really she was.
“You see she had been ill. There had been a good deal of sickness. She is now, in secret, very sad that she has had no children.
“But I must tell you of the Sunday afternoon, in the grove of trees, near Keokuk. We were strolling along a path and there was a great tree. Some boys had built a little house in the tree.
“It was not quite built. They were building it. They had brought a ladder out there and it was leaning against the tree.
“They had got boxes and boards. You know how boys are. Once I myself, when I was a boy, helped build such a house in a tree.
“We were playing that we were robbers, something like that.
“Anyway there I was, with the woman who became my wife, and we were standing by the tree.
“‘Let’s go up,’” I said.
“I began daring her to go up the ladder.
“It was one of the times when I had been trying to kiss her and suddenly I grew angry.
“‘I have found out what you are,’ I said. ‘You are a cold woman. You are pigheaded. Here I have been loving you for weeks, dreaming of you at night. My heart has fairly been torn out of my bosom,’ I said.
“I kept calling her names and presently she was also angry.
“She was always a thin woman. Her pale thin lips grew paler and suddenly, I don’t know why, I hadn’t really meant it when I suggested she climb up the ladder to the box in the tree, but up she went.
“She went up like a squirrel and there she was.
“She was up there in that little house. It was like a big store box without a top. She was sitting in it and crying.
“And what was I to do? Of course I went up to her. I was a heavy man then as I am now and I have always been awkward.
“Anyway, up I went and when I had reached the top of the ladder and was trying to crawl into the box, down the ladder went.
“I’ll tell you what, I almost fell. I had a struggle but I made it. I was in the box with her. There was just room for the two of us.
“When this happened it was late afternoon and then, after a time, it began to rain.
“There was water everywhere. You see she kept on crying. The tears were running down her cheeks and the rain was running over our bodies.
“We began to shout. We called until we were hoarse but no one answered and, after a time, darkness came.
“And what a night. She, you see, was thinly clad. She shivered. She cried. Oh how slowly the hours went by but, at any rate, she had to let me hug her. If I hadn’t hugged her she would have been frozen.
“We were in the tree all night. We couldn’t get down but, in the morning, let’s say at seven . . . I can’t be sure of that . . . it may have been eight o’clock when a man came through the grove.
“He was a working man of some sort. I remember that he carried a dinner pail. He may have been going to work in some factory in the town or on a nearby farm. How do I know?
“Anyway he got us down and I gave him a dollar. Carrie spoke of it later.
“‘Why did you give him a dollar?’ she asked. This was after we married. She thought that twenty-five cents would have been enough.
“We had to walk through the streets to her house. Did I tell you that she was thinly clad? She was very wet and her dress was clinging to her body. Every sharp curve of her thin body could be seen by all the people we passed.
“‘Oh Fred,’ she said, ‘and what will I tell my mother.’ She had grown quite affectionate, you see.
“As you can guess we had got quite well acquainted during the night.
“‘Oh tell her we are going to be married,’ I said.
* * *
“So, we did marry and there we were. I had come to Chicago, had become quite a prosperous man.
“As for the other woman, that is to say Mabel, the one who wrote me the note, well, as I have suggested, it was one of those things.
“A man, you see, is near a woman every day and all day long. She is nice. She is quite pretty. She is his secretary.
“He intends nothing much. Well, he goes along. He is dictating letters and suddenly he stops and has a conversation with her.
“They are sitting quite close. He tells her about himself and she, in her turn, speaks of herself and, as you can see, a kind of intimacy begins to grow up.
“With some men, with perfectly honorable men. . . .
“But I do not pretend that I am that. I am not honorable. I am a man of impulse, a sensitive man. I am ashamed but I go ahead.
“I was in my house and there was a note from that Mabel. Had I told her that I loved her? Yes, I am afraid I had.
“I had been swept away. I was a ship without a rudder. To tell the truth, I had told her I loved her. I had even held her once, for a moment, in my arms.
“And then I had seen, clearly enough, how impossible it was.
“‘We can’t go on,’ I had said to her. After all, I was married to Carrie.
“‘You had better get another place,’ I had said. I had promised to pay her wages while she was looking for another place and she had got angry.
“She had tramped out of my office, that was it. Whether or not the others in the office knew of what was going on I can’t say.
“And then, after a week, or perhaps two weeks had passed, she had written me the note.
“‘I still love you,’ it said.
“She had wanted me to meet her again. As it turned out, later when I did meet and talk with her for a moment, she had changed her mind about taking wages from me while she was looking for another place.
“I had put the note on the table in our bedroom. It was very careless of me. I had thought that Carrie had gone to the movies. Someone called me and I had gone downstairs.
“I had returned to our bedroom and had undressed for the night. I was in my bathrobe.
“And then Ann, our servant, called me again. It was something about the
sink in the kitchen, it had got stopped up and she wanted me to fix it. It is a sink that is always getting out of order.
“So I did. I put some lye in. I fixed it and then I went back upstairs to our bedroom and there was Carrie, my wife. She was reading the note from Mabel. What a moment!
“‘Good God,’ I thought.
“‘The fat is in the fire,’ I thought.
“As it happens Mabel is a little fat but that has nothing to do with what I was thinking.
“I just stood by the door of the room and there, facing the little table on which lay the note from Mabel was my wife Carrie. She did not look at me. She turned her face away and then she walked across the room and stood by the window.
* * *
“I tried something on her. ‘If a man lies and keeps on lying presently people will believe,’ I have always thought. It is a theory of mine. ‘Persistence does it,’ I have always said to myself. ‘This is my chance. I’ll try out my theory,’ I thought.
“I walked across the room, picking up the note as I passed the little table. I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I tore the note into bits and then I pulled the chain.
“There I was, you see, now there wasn’t any note. I came out of the bathroom and there was a storm of tears. Oh, what tears were shed. It went on all night. It went on for several nights and then there was a long period of silence.
“She had decided not to speak to me.
“‘All right,’ I said to myself. I had, you see, this theory. I was trying something out. Often enough I had said to myself, ‘Persistence does it,’ I had said.
“‘No matter how absurd the lie, tell it over and over and, in the end people will believe.’ That was, you see, my faith.
“I was, you understand, trying it out on my wife, Carrie.
“‘No, there wasn’t any note.’ I had seen no note. I knew no one named Mabel.
“I said it quietly, firmly, over and over. During the time when she wouldn’t speak to me I waited patiently. I said it when she was well and when she was ill.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 299
