One went out into our back yard on a winter’s night when there was snow on the ground and looked abroad. Already we lads read books, and snow-covered fields stretching away under the winter moon suggested strange, stirring thoughts — travelers beset by wolves on the Russian Steppes — emigrant trains lost in whirling snowstorms on the Western sagebrush deserts of our own country, men in all sorts of strange terrible places wandering, desperate and starving, under the winter moon — and what of us? The place where the cabbages were buried made a long white mound, directly across our back yard, and when one looked at it there was a sense of fullness and plenty in the land. One remembered that down under the snow, buried away in the straw, were those long rows of cabbages. Deer, buffaloes, wild horses and equally wild long-horned cattle, far out on the Western plains, did not worry about food because the ground was covered with snow. With their hoofs they pawed the snow away, and found buried beneath the snow the sweet little clusters of bunch grass, that again sent the Warmth of life singing through their bodies.
It was a chance for the fancy to play, to kick up its heels and have a good time. One could imagine the house in which one lived as a fort, set far out on the Western frontier. The cabbages had been put into the ground with the stalks straight up. They stuck up straight and stiff, like sentinels standing and, after looking, one went into the fort and slept quietly and peacefully. There the soldiers were — they were standing firm and unyielding. Were there enemies prowling out there in the white darkness, the little wild dogs of want? One could laugh at such thoughts. Were not the sentinels standing — quietly and firmly waiting? One could go into the fort and sleep in peace, hugging that thought.
To us at home, father was always, somewhat strangely, a part and at the same time not a part of our lives. He flew in and out as a bird flies in and out of a bush, and I am quite sure that, all through the years of our childhood, it never occurred to him to ask, when he set off on one of his winter adventures, whether or not there was anything to eat in our house. The fall came with its snows, and the little creeping fear of actual starvation for her brood, that must often have been in mother’s mind, followed by the spring, the warm rains, the promise of plenty and his return. If he brought no money, he did bring something — a ham, some combs of honey, a jug of cider, or even perhaps a quarter of beef. There he was again and there was food on the table. He made a gesture, “There!” he seemed to be saying; “you see.! Who says I’m not a provider?”
There were tales to be told and he was the teller of tales. “It is sufficient. Can man live by bread alone? There is food on the table now. Eat! Stuff yourselves! Spring has come and there are signs to be painted. The night has passed and it is another day. I am a man of faith. I tell you a sparrow shall not fall to the ground without my notice. I will make a tale of it — tell why and how it fell. The most marvelous tale in the world might be made from the fall of a sparrow. Is not the workman worthy of his hire? What about the lilies of the field, eh? They toil not and neither do they spin — do they?”
And yet, was Solomon, in all his glory, arrayed like one of these?
I remember a day in the early spring when we were compelled to move out of one house and into another. The rent for the house in which we had lived all during the winter had been long unpaid and mother had no money. Father had just returned from one of his long adventures, but early in the day of the moving he disappeared again and, as we could not afford a moving wagon, mother and we boys carted our poor belongings to the new place on our backs.
As for father, he had managed to borrow a horse and a spring wagon from a neighbor and had set off again into the country. The house to which we were moving was far out at the edge of the town and next to it was a field in which there was a great straw stack — a convenience, as what we called our “bed ticks,” on which we slept, had to be emptied of the straw that had become fine and dustlike from long use, and then refilled with the new straw.
When all was done and we were quite settled in the new place, father drove into the yard. He had noticed, he explained, a special kind of straw at a farmhouse some five miles away, at a place he had visited during his wanderings of the winter just past, and he had thought he would give us all a treat by getting that particular kind of straw for our beds.
And so he had driven off at daybreak, and, while we packed our furniture to the new place, had dined with the farmer and his family and had now returned. Although our beds had been made for the night the bed ticks must all be brought down again, the straw tumbled out and the special straw put in. “There,” he said, with one of his grand gestures, as we lads tramped wearily up the stairs with the refilled bags and as mother stood smiling — a little resentfully perhaps, but still smiling; “there, you kids, try sleeping on that. There is nothing on earth too good for my kids.”
NOTE IV
LET US, HOWEVER, return to father and the tale he is telling as he sits in the farmhouse on the winter’s evening. I am too good a son of my father to leave such a tale hanging forever thus, in the air.
As it turned out on that night, when it rained and when he in his young manhood stood just outside the door of that southern mansion house of his childhood, and when his mother, that proud woman of the Southland, spat at him and his companions in misery, so that a white speck of her spittle landed on his beard — where, as he said, it lay like a thing of fire burning into his soul — on that night, I say, he did, by a stroke of fortune, escape the fate that seemed to have him in its clutches.
Dawn was just beginning to break when the two Confederate officers came out at the door of the house and marched their prisoners away.
“We went off into the gray dawn, up out of the valley and over the hills, and then I turned to look back,” father explained. Gray and weary and half dead with starvation, he turned to look. If he dropped dead from starvation and weariness on his way to the prison pen, what did it matter now? The light of his life had gone out. He was never again to see any of his own people, that he knew.
But even as he looked he did see something. The company had stopped to rest for a moment and stood where a sharp wind blew over them, just at the crest of a hill. Down in the valley the dawn was just breaking and, as father looked, he could see the gray Of the old house and against the gray of it, on the front veranda, just a fleck of white.
That would be his young and innocent sister, come out of the house, you will understand, to look along the road taken by the prisoners, whose evident misery had touched her young heart.
For father it would be, as he would so elaborately explain, a very high spot in his life, perhaps the highest spot he was to reach in all his weary march to the grave.
He stood there on the hillside, quite cold and miserable — in just that utterly miserable and weary state when one is sometimes most alive — the senses, that is to say, are most alive. At the moment he felt, as any man must feel sometime in life, that an invisible cord does extend from the innermost parts of himself to the innermost parts of some other person. Love comes. For once in a lifetime a state of feeling becomes as definite a thing as a stone wall touched with the hand.
And father had that feeling, at that moment on the hill; and that the person for whom he had it was a woman and his own sister, made it even more an assured thing. He might have expressed the feeling by saying that, as by a miracle, the hill dropped away and he stood on dry level ground in the very presence of his younger sister, so close to her in fact that he might very easily have put out his hand and touched her. So strong was the feeling that he lost for the moment all sense of his presence among the prisoners, all sense of the cold hunger and weariness of the hour and — exactly as the thing might be done, quite ridiculously, by a second-rate actor in the movies — he did in fact step out from among the ranks of prisoners and, with his hands extended before him and his eyes shining, took several steps down the hillside, only to be stopped by an oath from one of the guards.
In the farmhouse, as he told of that moment
he would get out of his chair and actually take several steps. He would at bottom be always a good deal of an actor as well as a story-teller, as every story-teller worth his salt inevitably is.
And then came the oath from the guard and an upraised gun, the heavy butt of a gun, ready to swing down upon his head, and back he goes into the ranks of prisoners. He mutters some excuse:— “I just wanted to have a look” — and is thus jerked down from the high place, to which his imagination had suddenly lifted him, and back into the weariness of his apparently hopeless journey. Gone, he thought at the moment, was the sister he loved, his boyhood with its memories, all his past life, but it wasn’t quite true.
Father did make an escape. How many escapes he, in fancy, made from the hands of the enemy during that Civil War! He lived, you will understand, in a rather dull farming community and loved at least some air of probability hanging over his tales.
And so the Civil War became for him the canvas, the tubes of paint, the brushes with which he painted his pictures. Perhaps one might better say his own imagination was the brush and the Civil War his paint pot. And he did have a fancy for escapes, as I myself have always had. My own tales, told and untold, are full of escapes — by water in the dark and in a leaky boat, escapes from situations, escapes from dullness, from pretense, from the heavy-handed seriousness of the half artists. What writer of tales does not dote upon escapes? They are the very breath in our nostrils.
It is just possible that upon that occasion, father would have put it to his audience, that the sight, or the imagined sight, of his sister that morning had given him new hope. She was a virgin and there was something catholic about father. —
Very well, then, off he goes down the road with his head held high, thinking of the possible schemes for escape and of his sister. He had been given something, a new flair for life. A ray of new hope had come into the black night of his situation. He walked more stoutly.
Stout Cortes —
Silent upon a peak in Darien.
It was just that stout way in which he now walked that gave him his opportunity for escape — that time. All that day the other prisoners went with hanging heads, tramping through the deep mud of the southern roads in winter, but father walked with his head up.
Another night came and they were again in a forest, on a dark and lonely road, with the guards walking at the side and sometimes quite lost in the shadows cast by the trees — the prisoners a dark mass in the very centre of the road.
Father stumbled over a stick, the heavy branch of a tree, quite dead and broken off by the wind, and, stooping down, picked it up. Something, perhaps just the impulse of a soldier, led him to sling the stick lightly over his shoulder and carry it like a gun.
There he was, stepping proudly among those who were not proud — that is to say, the other prisoners — and not having any plan in mind — just thinking of his virginal sister back there, I dare say; and one of the two officers of the guard spoke to him kindly.
“Don’t walk in there so close to the Yanks, in the deep mud, John,” the officer said; “it’s better going out here. There is a path here at the side. Get in here back of me.”
By his very pride, lifted up out of the ranks of the prisoners, father’s mind acted quickly and with a muttered thanks he stepped to the side of the road and became as one of the guards. The men came out on the crest of another low hill and again, in the valley below, there was the faint light of a farmhouse. “Haiti” one of the officers gave command; and then — the younger of the two officers having been told by his superior to send a man down into the valley to the farmhouse to see if there was a chance for the guard and prisoners to rest for a few hours and to get food — he sent father. The officer touched him on the arm. “Go on you,” he said. “You go down and find out.”
So off father went, down a lane, holding the stick very correctly, like a gun, until he was safely out of sight of the others, and then he threw the stick away and ran.
The devil! He knew every inch of the ground on which he now stood. What an opportunity for escape! One of his boyhood friends had lived in the very house, toward which he was supposed to be going, and often, in his young manhood and when he had come home for vacation from the northern school, he had ridden and hunted along the very path his feet now touched. Why, the very dogs and “niggers” on the place knew him as they might have known their master.
And so, if he ran madly now, he ran knowing the ground under his feet. Ah, he would be sure! When his escape was discovered dogs might be set on his trail.
He plunged downward, getting clear of the trees, running across a field — the soft mud clinging to his feet — and so skirted the house and got to where there was a small creek down which he went for a mile in the darkness, walking in the cold water that often came up to his waist. That was to throw dogs off his trail, as any schoolboy should know.
By making a great circle he got back into the road, by which he and the other prisoners had been marched from his own father’s house. They had come some twelve miles during the day and early evening, but the night was still young and, after he had gone three or four miles, he knew a short cut through the woods by which several miles could be cut off.
And so, you see, father went back again to his old home after all and once again saw the sister he loved. The dawn was just breaking when he arrived, but the dogs knew him and the negroes knew him. The very negro who had held the light while his mother spat at the prisoners hid him away in the loft of a barn and brought him food.
Not only food was brought, but also a suit of his own clothes that had been left in the house.
And so he stayed hidden in the loft for three days, and then another night came when it rained and was dark.
Then he crept out, with food for the needs of his journey, and knowing that, when he had walked for a mile along the road that led back toward the distant Union camp, a negro would be standing in a little grove with a good horse saddled and bridled for him. The negro, in the late afternoon, had gone off to a distant town, ostensibly for mail and was to be bound to a tree where he would be discovered later by a party of other negroes sent in search of him. Oh, all was arranged — everything elaborately planned to ward off, from his helpers, the wrath of the mother.
There was the night and the rain, and father, with a dark cloak now about his shoulders, creeping from the stables and toward the house. By the window of one of the rooms downstairs his young sister sat playing an organ, and so he crept to the window and stood for a time looking. Ah; there was moving-picture stuff for your soul! Why, oh why, did not father live in another and later generation? In what affluence might we not all have flourished! The old homestead, a fire burning in the grate, the stern and relentless parent, and outside in the cold and wet father, the outcast son, the disowned, the homeless one, about to ride off into the night in the service of his country — never to return.
On the organ his sister would have been playing “The Last Link is Broken,” and there stands father with the great tears rolling down his cheeks.
Then to ride away into the night, to fight again for the flag he loved, and that to him meant more than home, more than family — ah! more than the love of the woman who was long afterward to come into his life, and to console him somewhat for the fair sister he had lost.
For he did love her, quite completely. Is it not odd, when one considers the matter, that the fair sister — who would have been my aunt, and who never perhaps existed except in father’s fancy, but concerning whom I have heard him tell so many touching tales — is it not odd that I have never succeeded in inventing a satisfactory name for her? Father never — if I remember correctly — gave her a name and I have never succeeded in doing so.
How often have I tried and without success! Ophelia, Cornelia, Emily, Violet, Eunice. You see the difficulty? It must have a quaint and southern sound and must suggest — what must it not suggest?
But father’s tale must have its proper dénouement. One could trust
the tale-teller for that. Even had he lived in the days of the movies and had the dénouement quite killed his story — for movie purposes, at least in the northern towns, which would have been the best market — even in the face of all of such difficulties which he fortunately did not have to meet, one could be quite sure of the dénouement.
And he made it splashy. It was at the dreadful battle of Gettysburg, late in the war and on the third of July too. The Confederates had such a dreadful way of getting off on just the wrong foot on the very eve of our national holiday. Vicksburg and Gettysburg for Fourth of July celebrations.
Surely it was, what, during the World War, would have been called, “bad war psychology.”
There can be no doubt that father had been a soldier of some sort during the Civil War and so, as was natural, he would give his tale a soldier’s dénouement, sacrificing even the beloved and innocent younger sister to his purpose (to be brought back to life — oh, many, many times later, and made to serve in many future tales).
It was the second day of that great, that terrible battle of Gettysburg, father had picked upon to serve as the setting for the end of his yarn.
That was a moment! All over the North the people stood waiting; farmers stopped working in the fields and drove into northern towns, waiting for the click of the little telegraph instruments; country doctors let the sick lie unattended and stood with all the others in the streets of towns, where was no running in and out of stores. The whole North stood waiting, listening. No time for talk now.
Ah! that Confederate General Lee — the neat quiet Sunday-school superintendent among generals! One could never tell what he would do next. Was it not all planned that the war should be fought out on southern soil? — and here he had brought a great army of his finest troops far into the North.
Everyone waited and listened. No doubt the South waited and listened too.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 334
