Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  No Lincoln and Douglas debates now. “A nation cannot exist half slave and half free.”

  Now there is the rattle of the box, and the dice that shall decide the fate of a nation are being thrown. In an obscure farmhouse, far in the North, long after the battle of those two terrible days was fought and half forgotten, father also has got his hands on the dice box. He is rattling words in it now. We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles. No uniforms for us, no riders springing away into the gray smoke-mist of battle to carry out orders. We must sit in lonely farmhouses or in cheap rooms in city lodging houses before our typewriters; but if we do not look like generals, we at least feel like that at moments anyway.

  Father dropping his little rattling words into the hearts of the farmer, the farmer’s wife, Tilly’s heart too. At Gettysburg a nation in the death grapple. The innocent sister, fair virgin of the South, cast in too.

  Look at the eyes of that stoic Aldrich. They are shining now, eh? Ah! he has been a soldier too. In his youth he also stood firmly amid shot and shell, but ever after, poor dear, he had to be satisfied with mere blank dumbness about it all. At the best he could but turn the crank of a magic-lantern machine or join the G. A. R., and march with other men through the streets of an Ohio town on Decoration days, when the real question in the minds of all the onlookers was as to whether Clyde or Tiffin, Ohio, would win the ball game to be played at Ame’s field that afternoon.

  A poor sort Aldrich, being able to do nothing but fight. On Decoration days he marched dumbly through the dust to a graveyard and listened to an address made by a candidate for Congress, who had made his money in the wholesale poultry business. At best Aldrich could but speak in low tones to another comrade, as the file of men marched along. “I was with Grant at the Wilderness and before that at Shiloh. Where were you? Oh, you were with Sherman, one of Sherman’s bummers, eh?”

  That and no more for Aldrich — but for father, ah!

  The second day at Gettysburg and Pickett’s men ready for their charge. Was that not a moment? What men — those fellows of Pickett’s — the very flower of the Southland — young bearded giants, tough like athletes, trained to the minute.

  It is growing late on that second day of the fight and Pickett’s men are to decide it all. The sun will soon be going down behind the hills of that low flat valley — the valley in which, but a few short days ago, farmers were preparing to gather the grain crops. On the slope of one of the hills a body of men lies waiting. It is the flower of the Union army too. Father is among them, lying there.

  They wait.

  They are not trembling, but back of them in a thousand towns men and women are both waiting and trembling. Freedom itself waits and trembles — liberty is trembling— “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time” is trembling like a broken reed. How many grand passages, words, Decoration day addresses, messages to Congress, Fourth of July addresses of the next two hundred years, not worth eight cents on the dollar at the moment!

  And now they come — Pickett’s men — down through the valley, in and out of groves of trees and up the little slope. There is a place, known to history as “the bloody angle.” There the men of the South rush straight into a storm of iron. A hailstorm of iron swept also in among the men of the North waiting for them.

  That wild Rebel yell that broke from the lips of Pickett’s men is dying now. The lips of Pickett s men are turning white.

  The voice of Meade has spoken and down through the valley go the Union men in their turn — father among them.

  It was then that a bullet in the leg dropped him in his tracks, and in memory of that moment he stops the telling of his tale in the farmhouse long enough to pull up his pants leg and show the scar of his wound. Father was a true naturalist, liked to pin his tales down to earth, put a spike of truth in them — at moments.

  He pitched forward and fell and the men of his company rolled on to a victory in which he could have no part. He had fallen in what was now, suddenly, a little, quiet place among trees in an old orchard, and there close beside him was a confederate boy, mortally wounded. The two men roll uneasily in their pain and look directly into each other’s eyes. It is a long, long look the two men give each other, for one of them the last look into the eyes of a fellow before he goes on, over the river.

  The man lying there, and now dying, is just that young man who, as a boy, was father’s best friend and comrade, the lad to whose place — some twelve miles from his own father’s plantation — he used to ride for days of sport. What rides they had taken together through the forests, a pack of dogs at their heels, and what talks they then had!

  You will understand that the young man now dying lived in that very house, far back from the road, toward which father went that night when he escaped the Rebel guard. He had marched off with the stick over his shoulder, you will remember, and had then cut off across fields to his own home where he was concealed by the negroes until the night of his final escape.

  And he had gone away from his own home on that dark night, dreaming of a return, some time when the cruel war was over and the wounds it had made were healed; but now he could never return. He was condemned to remain alone, a wanderer always on the face of this earth.

  For the lad now dying beside him on the field of Gettysburg was, in his death hour, telling a fearful and tragic story.

  Father’s family had been entirely wiped out. His father had been killed in battle as had also his brothers.

  And now, from the lips of his old comrade, he was to hear the most fearful tale of all.

  A party of northern foragers had come to the southern plantation house on just such another dark, rainy night as the one on which he was taken there as a prisoner. They marched as the confederate troops had marched, along the driveway to the front of the house, and stood on the lawn. A northern officer’s voice called as the southern officer had called on that other night, and again the tall young negro came to the door with a light, followed by that fiery woman of the Southland.

  The negro held the light above his head so that, even in the darkness, the blue coats of the hated northern troops could be seen.

  The old southern woman came to stand at the edge of the porch. She understood for what purpose the northern men had come, and she had sworn that not a bite of food, raised on that plantation, should ever pass the lips of a Yank.

  Now she held a shotgun in her hand and, without a word or without any sort of warning, raised it and fired into the mass of the men.

  There was a cry of rage, and then many guns were raised to shoulders. A sudden roar of the guns and a hundred leaden bullets cut through the front of the house. It wiped out all of father’s family — except just himself — and deprived his sons, too, of a proud southern ancestry; for, just in the moment, before the shower of bullets came, father’s young and innocent sister — realizing with that sure instinct that, everyone understands, all women inevitably possess — realizing, I say, that death was about to call her mother — the young girl had rushed panic-stricken out of the door and had thrown her arms about her mother’s body, just in time to meet death with her. And so all that was left of the family — except just father — fell there in a heap. The captain of the northern troops — a German brewer’s son from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, cried when later he looked down into the white silent face of the young girl, and all his life afterward carried in his heart the remembrance of the dead, pleading young eyes; but, as father so philosophically remarked, what was done was done.

  And with that fall there was father — a man left to wander forever stricken and forlorn through life. Later he had, to be sure, married and he had children whom he loved and treasured, but was that the same thing? To the heart of a southerner, as every American understands, ancestry means everything.

  The purity of a southern woman is unlike any other pu
rity ever known to mankind. It is something special. The man who has been under the influence of it can never afterward quite escape. Father didn’t expect to. He declared always, after he had told the above story, that he did not ever expect to be gay or happy again.

  What he expected was that he would go on for the rest of his days doing just what he was doing at the time. Well, he would try to bring a little joy into the hearts of others — he would sing songs, dance a little dance — he would join an old comrade in arms, one whose heart he knew was as true as steel, and give a magic-lantern show. Others, for an hour anyway, would be made to forget that element of sadness and tragedy in life that he, of course, could never quite forget.

  On that very night, lying half dead on the field of Gettysburg beside the dead comrade of his youth, he had made up his mind to spend the remaining days of his life bringing what sweetness and joy he could into the lacerated hearts of a nation torn by civil strife. It had been two o’clock in the morning before he was picked up by a squad of men sent out to gather in the wounded, and already the news of the great victory and the triumph of the cause of freedom was sweeping over the northern land. And he had lain looking at the stars and had made his resolution. Others might seek for the applause of the ‘world, but, as for himself, he would go into the dusty highways and byways of life and bring to the lowly and forgotten the joy of a little fun at the schoolhouse.

  NOTE V

  AS FOR THE show father and Aldrich put on, that is another matter. One may, without too much injustice, reserve judgment on the show. I myself never saw one of their performances, but one of my brothers once did and always, quietly and with commendable firmness, refused to speak of it afterward.

  Fancy will, however, serve. Aldrich would show his pictures of McKinley, Grover Cleveland and the others, and then father would sing and do one of his dances. There would be more pictures and another song and dance and after that the picture of the flag, in colors. If the night were fair forty or even fifty people, farmers, their wives, the hired men and the children, would gather in the schoolhouse. The show only cost ten cents. Too much injustice was not done them.

  It is, however, rather a shame they did not let father tell stories instead. Perhaps in all his life it never occurred to him they might have been written. Poor father! As a public figure, he had to content himself with the exercise of an art in which he was as bad, I fancy, as any man who has ever lived.

  And it is his singing and dancing that remains like a scar in my memory of him. In the late fall, before Aldrich and he started out on their adventure, father used to rehearse upstairs in our house.

  The evening meal would have been out of the way and we children would be sitting by the stove, about the table in the kitchen. Mother had washed clothes during the day and now she was doing an ironing. Father walked about, his hands clasped behind his back as though in deep thought, and occasionally he raised his eyes to the ceiling, while his lips moved silently.

  Then he went out of the room and we heard him go upstairs into a bedroom above. None of us, in the kitchen below, looked at each other. We pretended to read books, to get our school lessons, or we looked at the floor.

  At that time the humor of America — of which we Americans were so inordinately proud — expressed itself in the broader and less subtle jokes of Mark Twain, Bill Nye and Petroleum V. Nasby, and there was a book, commonly read by both children and grown-ups, and reputed to be very funny, called, “Peck’s Bad Boy.” It told, if I remember correctly, of the doings of a certain quite terrible youngster who put chewing gum or molasses on the seats of chairs, threw pepper into people’s eyes, stuck pins into schoolteachers, hung cats over clotheslines by their tails, and did any number of other such charmingly expressive things.

  This terrible child was, as I have said, reputed to be very funny and the book recounting his doings must have sold tremendously. And father, having read it, had written a ballad concerning just such another youngster. This child also made life a hell for his fellows, and his father was very proud of him. When the child had done something unusually shocking the father tried, one gathered, to share in the honor.

  At any rate the refrain of father’s song was:

  “You grow more like your dad every day.”

  Evening after evening these words rang through our house. They made all of us children shiver a little. Father sang them, danced a few halting steps, and then sang them again.

  In the kitchen, as I have already said, we others sat with our eyes on the floor. One could not hear the words of the verses themselves, but the spirit of the song was known to all of us. Am I right? Were there — sometimes — tears in mother’s eyes as she bent over the ironing board?

  Of that, after all, I cannot be too sure. I can only be everlastingly sure of the refrain:

  “You grow more like your dad every day.”

  And, however that may be, there is always one consoling thought. As a showman, and on stormy nights, there must sometimes have been but slight audiences at the schoolhouses and the takings for Aldrich and father must have been thin. One fancies evenings when eighty cents might cover all the receipts at the door.

  One thinks of the eighty cents and shudders, and then a consoling thought comes. Of one thing we may be quite sure — father and Aldrich would not have gone hungry, and at night there must always have been comfortable beds into which they could crawl. Father had promised Aldrich he would see to the matter of bed and board.

  And no doubt he did.

  Even though the farmer and the farmer’s wife should have proved hard-hearted one remembers the number of Tillies in the farmhouses of Ohio. When everything else failed the Tillies would have taken care of the troubadours. Of that one may be, I should say, very very sure.

  NOTE VI

  TO THE IMAGINATIVE man in the modern world something becomes, from the first, sharply defined. Life splits itself into two sections and, no matter how long one may live or where one may live, the two ends continue to dangle, fluttering about in the empty air.

  To which of the two lives, lived within the one body, are you to give yourself? There is, after all, some little freedom of choice.

  There is the life of fancy. In it one sometimes moves with an ordered purpose through ordered days, or at the least through ordered hours. In the life of the fancy there is no such thing as good or bad. There are no Puritans in that life. The dry sisters of Philistia do not come in at the door. They cannot breathe in the life of the fancy. The Puritan, the reformer who scolds at the Puritans, the dry intellectuals, all who desire to uplift, to remake life on some definite plan conceived within the human brain die of a disease of the lungs. They would do better to stay in the world of fact to spend their energy in catching bootleggers, inventing new machines, helping humanity — as best they can — in its no doubt laudable ambition to hurl bodies through the air at the rate of five hundred miles an hour.

  In the world of the fancy, life separates itself with slow movements and with many graduations into the ugly and the beautiful. What is alive is opposed to what is dead. Is the air of the room in which we live sweet to the nostrils or is it poisoned with weariness? In the end it must become the one thing or the other.

  All morality then becomes a purely æsthetic matter. What is beautiful must bring æsthetic joy; what is ugly must bring æsthetic sadness and suffering.

  Or one may become, as so many younger Americans do, a mere smart-aleck, without humbleness before the possibilities of life, one sure of himself — and thus one may remain to the end, blind, deaf and dumb, feeling and seeing nothing. Many of our intellectuals find this is the more comfortable road to travel.

  In the world of fancy, you must understand, no man is ugly. Man is ugly in fact only. Ah, there is the difficulty!

  In the world of fancy even the most base man’s actions sometimes take on the forms of beauty. Dim pathways do sometimes open before the eyes of the man who has not killed the possibilities of beauty in himself by being too sure.r />
  Let us (in fancy) imagine for a moment an American lad walking alone at evening in the streets of an American town.

  American towns, and in particular American towns of the Middle West of twenty years ago, were not built for beauty, they were not built to be lived in permanently. A dreadful desire of escape, of physical escape, must have got, like a disease, into our father’s brains. How they pitched the towns and cities together! What an insanity! The lad we have together invented, to walk at evening in the streets of such a town, must of necessity be more beautiful than all the hurriedly built towns and cities in which he may walk. True immaturity of the body and the spirit is more beautiful than mere tired-out physical maturity: the physical maturity of men and women that has no spiritual counterpart within itself falls quickly into physical and ugly decay — like the cheaply constructed frame houses of so many of our towns.

  The lad of our fancy walks in the streets of a town hurriedly thrown together, striving to dream his dreams, and must continue for a long time to walk in the midst of such ugliness. The cheap, hurried, ugly construction of America’s physical life still goes on and on. The idea of permanent residence has not taken hold on us. Our imaginations are not yet fired by love of our native soil.

  The American boy of our mutual imaginative creation is walking in the streets of an Ohio town, after the factories have begun coming and the day of the hustlers is at hand, the houses of the town pushed up quickly, people swarming into the town who have no notion of staying there — a surprising number of them will stay, but they have, at ‘first, no intention of staying.

  Before the boy’s day how slow the growth of the towns! There were the people of an older generation, coming out slowly to the Middle West, from New York state, from Pennsylvania, from New England — a great many to my own Ohio country from New England. They had come drifting in slowly, bringing traces of old customs, sayings, religions, prejudices. The young farmers came first, glad of the rich free soil and the friendlier climate — strong young males that were to come in such numbers as to leave New England, with its small fields and its thinner, stonier soil, a place of aging maiden ladies — that old-maid civilization that was, nevertheless, to be the seat of our American culture. An insane fear of the flesh, a touch of transcendentalism, a reaching always up into the sky. In the ground underfoot there is only fear, poverty, hardship. One must look upward, always upward.