Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  And into the bright morning air shot a great fountain of mud and muddy water. The derrick over the hole was covered with it, the grass in the meadow was covered and much of it fell down like rain on us in the wood. The front of Penny Jacobs’ boiled shirt was covered with it.

  The mud fell on us lads, too, but that didn’t matter so much. None of us had put on Sunday clothes. Our elders, who represented among us the capitalistic class, went over and stood about the well for a time, and then went sadly off up the road to unhitch their horses and drive back to town.

  When we lads emerged from the woods no one was left but the well-shooter, and he was suspect, and grumpy as well, not having breakfasted. Those of us whose fathers had no money invested were inclined to take the whole matter as rather a delicious joke, but were overruled. We stood about for a time, staring at the well-shooter, who was engaged in gathering his paraphernalia together, and then we also moved off toward town.

  “I’ll bet that well-shooter’s a crook,” said one of my companions. He had, I remember, a great deal of mud in his hair and on his face. He kept complaining as we went along. “He could have stuck that nitro-glycerine only halfway down, and then set it off, that’s what he could have done.” The idea, later taken up enthusiastically by the entire community, pleased us all. It was so apparent the well-shooter was not the hero we had hoped. He didn’t look like a hero. “Well, my dad says he knows him. He lives over by Monroeville and he gets drunk and beats his wife, my dad says so,” another lad declared.

  It was rather a good solution of our difficulty. If one can’t have a hero, who wants just a teamster?

  It was infinitely better to have a villainous well-shooter about whose Machiavelian machinations one’s imagination could linger in happiness.

  NOTE VIII

  IT MUST HAVE been about this time that my own imaginative life began to take form. Having listened to the tales told by my father, I wanted to begin inventing tales of my own. At that time and for long years afterward, there was no notion of writing. Did I want an audience, someone to hear me tell my tales? It is likely I did. There is something of the actor in me.

  When later I began to write I for a time told myself I would never publish, and I remember that I went about thinking of myself as a kind of heroic figure, a silent man creeping into little rooms, writing marvelous tales, poems, novels — that would never be published.

  Perhaps it never went quite that far. They would have to be published sometime. My vanity demanded that. Very well — I had died and had been buried in some obscure place. In my actual physical life I had been a house-painter, a workman in a factory, an advertising writer — whatever you please. I had passed unnoticed through the throng, you see. “I say, John, who is that fellow over there?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen him about. He looks like a movie actor or a gambler to me.”

  You see, I dreamed of something like that — dead and buried away — and then one day a man is snooping about in a garret in an old empty house. He finds a pile of papers and begins looking them over, lazily, without much interest. But look I “Hello here! Say, here is something!”

  You get the notion. I’ll not go into it further. It might have been a good card had I found within myself the courage to play it, but I didn’t.

  As to that first tale of mine and its invention. It grew out of dissatisfaction with my father and a desire to invent another to take his place. And professional jealousy may have had something to do with it. He had been strutting about long enough. “Get out from under the spotlight for a time, daddy. Give your son a chance to see what he can do,” I perhaps really wanted to say.

  It was fall and father had taken me with him to do a house-painting job in the country. The year was growing old and bad rainy weather had come. Perhaps we could not finish the painting job we were about to begin, but, as father had explained to the farmer who had just built a new house, we could at least put on a priming coat.

  If the worst happened and we lost a good deal of time, waiting about— “well,” said father winking at me, “you see, kid, we’ll eat.”

  The farmer came for us in the early morning, driving in a spring wagon into which was to be packed the ladders, pots and other materials of our trade, and by the time we had got to his place the rain, that had persisted for several days, began again. The carpenters were still at work inside the house, so that nothing could be done there, and father went off to the old cabin in which the farmer and his family were living until the new house could be finished. He would spend the day gossiping with the women folk or perhaps reading some book he had found in the house. The farmer had a barrel of hard cider in his cellar. The day promised to be not too depressing for father.

  As for myself, I made the acquaintance of the farmer’s son, a lad my own age, and we decided to go squirrel hunting in the near-by woods. “You wait ‘til father drives down into the new clearing. He’s going to bring up some fence posts. Then we’ll take the gun and cut out. If he gets onto us he’ll give me some job, make me wheel out manure, or whitewash the henhouse, or something like that.”

  We spent the morning and early afternoon tramping through muddy fields to visit the wood lots on neighboring farms and came home too late for the noon meal, but my new-found friend managed to get some sandwiches, made of huge slices of bread and cold meat, and bring them to the barn.

  We were tired and wet and had got no squirrels and so we crawled up into the hay loft and burrowed down into the warm hay.

  When we had finished eating our lunch and had got ourselves comfortably warm my companion, a fat boy of perhaps sixteen, wanted to talk.

  We talked as young males do, of hunting and what naturally good shots we were but that we were not used to just the kind of gun we had been handling. Then we spoke of riding horses and how nice it would have been had we both been cowboys, and finally of the girls we had known. What was a fellow to do? How was he to get close to some girl who wasn’t too hoity-toity. The fat boy had a sister of about his own age that I wanted to ask about but didn’t dare. What was she like? Was she too hoity-toity?

  We spoke vaguely of other girls we had been seated near at school, or had met at boy-and-girl parties. “Did you ever kiss a girl? I did once,” said the fat boy. “Kiss, eh? Is that all you’ve done? I answered, feeling the necessity of maintaining a kind of advantage, due to my position as a town boy.

  The hay into which we had burrowed deeply, so that just our heads were in the outer air, was sweet to the nostrils and warm and we began to grow sleepy. What was the use of talking of girls? They were silly things and had in some queer way the power to unman a boy, to make a fellow act and feel nervous and uneasy.

  We lay in silence, thinking each his own thoughts, and presently the fat boy closed his eyes and slept.

  Father came upon the floor of the stable with his employer the farmer, and the two men pulled boxes to the door looking out into the barnyard and began to talk.

  The farmer explained that he had come into our country from New England, from Vermont, when he was a young man, and had gone into debt for two hundred acres of land, when land could be had cheap. He had worked and he had achieved. In time the farm had been paid for and fifty additional acres bought. It had taken time, patience, and hard labor. Much of the land had to be cleared. A man worked day and night, that’s how he managed to get on.

  And now he was building a new house. “Well,” he had said to his wife; “Mary, you have been a good wife to me and I want you to have every comfort.” The house was to have a bathroom and a bathtub. It would cost money and maybe it would be all foolishness, but he wanted his wife to have it. When a man was young he didn’t mind splashing about in a washtub in a woodshed on Saturday evenings, but when he got a little older and had, now and then, a touch of rheumatism, well, he thought his wife deserved to have a bathtub in the house if she wanted it, no matter what it cost.

  Father agreed with his host. (It is perhaps as well to think of him as our
host and ourselves as guests since we stayed two weeks and worked but two days.) He said that he had always felt just that way himself. Women were the weaker sex and a man had to take that into consideration. “You take a woman, now, that is like a horse and I don’t like her,” said father. He spoke of mother as though she had been a weak, gentle thing, entirely dependent upon the strength in himself in getting through her life. “I married my wife up in your own state, up in Vermont,” father said, indulging in one of his characteristic quick imaginative flights.

  And now that he had got a start I knew there was no telling where his flight might end and I listened for a time, and then, turning away in disgust, I began working my way downward into the hay. My mother, now dead, was something I prized. He had just said she was born in Vermont of an old decayed English gentle family. She wasn’t very strong but would have children. They were born one after the other, but, thank God I because of his own great natural strength his boys were strong.

  “The one I have out here with me now was born in Kentucky,” he said. “I took my wife down there on a visit to my own father’s place and he was born during the visit. I thought his mother would die that time, but she didn’t — I saved her. Night and day I stayed in her sick room, nursing her.”

  Now he had got himself launched and I knew the farmer would have no more chance to do his own bragging. Father would invent another decayed, gentle family in Kentucky to match the one he had just so lightly brought into existence in the cold barren hills of Vermont.

  But I was getting deeper and deeper down into the hay now and the sounds of his voice grew faint, words could no longer be distinguished. There was only a gentle murmuring sound, far off — like a summer breeze just stirring the leaves of a forest; or, better yet, like the soft murmur of some southern sea. Already, you see, I had begun reading romances and knew, in fancy, just how the seas of the South murmured and beat upon coral islands; and then how the fearful hurricane came ramping along and swept the seas clear of ships. No one reads as a boy reads. The boy gives himself utterly to the printed page and perhaps the most blessed of all the tribe of the inkpots are those who write what we used to call “dime novels”’ — blessed in their audience, I mean, to be sure.

  So there I was, sunk far down into a mythical Southland, my own Southland, product of my own imaginings — not father’s. One could go deep down into the hay and still breathe. All sounds became faint, even the gentle sound of the snoring of the fat boy some ten feet away. One closed the eyes and stepped off into a fragrant new world. Mother was in that new world, but not father. I had left him out in the cold.

  I considered the matter of births — my own birth in particular. The idea of being born in Kentucky — the result of a union between two decaying, gentle families — did not strike my fancy, not much.

  The devil! Even then I felt myself a little the product of a new age and a new land. Could I then have had all the thoughts I am now about to attribute to myself! Probably not. But these notes make no pretense of being a record of fact. That, isn’t their object. They are merely notes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas that have floated through the mind of one present-day American. It is likely that I have not, and will not, put into them one truth, measuring by the ordinary standards of truth. It is my aim to be true to the essence of things. That’s what I’m after.

  And haven’t we Americans built enough railroads and factories, haven’t we made our cities large and dirty and noisy enough, haven’t we been giving ourselves to surface facts long enough? Let us away with the fact of existence, for the moment at least. You, the reader, are to imagine yourself sitting under a tree with me on a summer afternoon; or, better yet, lying with me in the sweet-smelling hay in an Ohio barn. We shall let our fancies loose, lie to ourselves if you please. Let us not question each other too closely.

  There is America, now. What is America? Whee! I say, now, don’t begin with such a gigantic question as that.

  Let’s think a little about what it isn’t. It isn’t English, for one thing, and — isn’t it odd? — the notion persists that it is. If we are ever to have a race of our own here — if the melting pot we are always talking about ever really melts up the mass — how English, how German, how Puritanic will it be? Not very much, I fancy. Too many Slavs, Poles, Wops, Chinese, Negroes, Mexicans, Hindoos, Jews, whatnot, for the old influences to hold in the end.

  But is it not odd how that old notion persists? A few English came and settled in that far-away frozen northeast corner — New England — and their sons did the book-writing and the school-teaching. They did not get themselves — physically — as breeders — very deeply into the new blood of the land, but they made their notion of what we are and of what we are to be stick pretty well.

  In time, however, the basic cultural feeling of the land must change too. Mind cannot persist without body. Blood will tell.

  And in my own time I was to see the grip of the old New England, the Puritanic culture, begin to loosen. The physical incoming of the Celts, Latins, Slavs, men of the Far East, the blood of the dreaming nations of the world gradually flowing thicker and thicker in the body of the American, and the shrewd shop-keeping money-saving blood of the northern men getting thinner and thinner.

  But I run far, far ahead of myself. Did ray own fancy, even then, as a boy, lying in the hay in the barn, did it run ahead of ray own day and my own time? Of that I cannot say, but of one thing I am quite certain — in all my life I have never for a moment subscribed to the philosophy of life as set forth by the Saturday Evening Post, the Atlantic Monthly, Yale, “Upward and Onward,”

  “The White Man’s Burden,” etc.

  There was always within me a notion of another aspect of life — at least faintly felt — a life that dreamed a little of more colorful and gaudy things — cruelty and tragedy creeping in the night, laughter, splashing sunlight, the pomp and splendor of the old tyrants, the simple devotion of old devotees.

  Had I not seen and did I not then sharply remember that old grandmother from the southeast of Europe, she with the one eye and the quick, dark and dangerous temper! There were possibilities of cruelty in her. Once she had tried to kill my sister with a butcher knife, and one could think of her as killing with a laugh on her lips. Having known her one could easily conceive of the possibility of a life in which cruelty had its place too.

  At that moment as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay and when the fancy of my own flesh-and-blood father, down on the floor of the barn, was giving me a birthright of decaying Germanic gentlefolk the dark old woman who was my grandmother was more in my line.

  And no doubt the warmth of the hay itself may have had something to do with the setting and the mood of my first invented tale, as you will perceive as you read of it. Cruelty, like breadfruit and pineapples, is a product, I believe, of the South. By the tale, told me by my parents, I had myself been born in a place called Camden, Ohio, and in the articles touching on my birthplace that have appeared in newspapers that town has always been named. It was one of the towns through which father and mother had trekked when they were first married.

  Father must have had a little money at that time, as there is a tradition of his having been a merchant, and of course there were not, at that time, so many children. One could get up and out more easily. Moving, perhaps at night, from town to town, to escape bill collectors, was not so difficult. And then I fancy that, at first his own people, from time to time, sent him money. However, I know little of his people and only have the notion because I cannot conceive of his having earned it or of his having made it by his shrewdness.

  And so he was a merchant then, the grandest thing one could be in a small Ohio town at that time. He kept shop in places known as Camden, Morning Sun and Caledonia, Ohio. I believe he and President Harding once played in the same brass band at Caledonia.

  He was in the saddlery and harness business and you cannot fail to catch the flavor of that. There would be a little shop on the to
wn’s main street with a leather horse collar hanging on a peg over the sidewalk before the door. Inside there would be shiny new harness hanging on the shop walls and, in the morning when the sun crept in, the brass and nickel buckles would shine like jewels.

  Young farmers coming in with great work harnesses on their shoulders and throwing them with a great rattle and bang on the floor — the rich pungent smell of leather — an old man, a workman, a harness-maker, sitting on his horse and sewing a strap — on the floor by the stove a wooden box filled with sawdust into which the workmen and the visiting farmers, all of whom would chew tobacco, could spit —

  Father prancing about — the young merchant then, with the young merchant’s heavy silver watch and gold chain — a prospective Marshall Field, a Wanamaker, a Julius Rosenwald, in his own fancy, perhaps.

  “Hello, you, Ted. When you go’en a get that trace sewed up? These new fangle factory harnesses ain’t worth a tinker’s dam. How’s wheat looking out your way? No, the frost ain’t all out of the ground yet. What do you think of elections, eh? D’you hear what that fellow said— ‘all Democrats ain’t horse thieves, but all horse thieves is democrats’? Do you think Frank Means will make it for sheriff?”

  That — in just that tone — and in a small frame house on a side street of the town myself waiting to be born.

  What is a birth? Has a man no rights of his own?

  NOTE IX

  SUCH a birth in an Ohio Village — the neighbor women coming in to help — rather fat women in aprons.

  They have had children of their own and are not too excited, but stand about, waiting and indulging in gossip. “If the men had to have the babies there would never be more than one child in a family. What do men know about suffering? It’s the women who have to do all the suffering in life, I always said — I said a woman feels everything deeper than a man — don’t you think so? A woman has intuition, that’s what it is.”