by Collected Stories- Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses
The water boy for the threshing crew rode the horse Pegasus down through the lanes back of the farm houses in Erie County, Ohio, to the creeks where the threshing tanks must be filled. Beside him on the soft earth in the forest walked the young god Jesus. At the creek Pegasus, born of the springs of Ocean, stamped on the ground. The plodding farm horses stopped. With a dazed look in his eyes Tom Edwards arose from the wagon seat and prepared his hose and pump for filling the tank. The god Jesus walked away over the land, and with a wave of his hand summoned the smiling days.
A light came into Tom Edwards’ eyes and grace seemed to come also into his heavy maturing body. New impulses came to him. As the threshing crew went about, over the roads and through the villages from farm to farm, women and young girls looked at the young man and smiled. Sometimes as he came from the fields to a farmer’s barn, with a load of wheat in bags on his wagon, the daughter of the farmer stepped out of the farm house and stood looking at him. Tom looked at the woman and hunger crept into his heart and, in the evenings while the thresherman and his sons sat on the ground by the barns and talked of their affairs, he walked nervously about. Making a motion to the fat boy, who was not really interested in the talk of his father and brothers, the two younger men went to walk in the nearby fields and on the roads. Sometimes they stumbled along a country road in the dusk of the evening and came into the lighted streets of a town. Under the store-lights young girls walked about. The two boys stood in the shadows by a building and watched and later, as they went homeward in the darkness, the fat boy expressed what they both felt. They passed through a dark place where the road wound through a wood. In silence the frogs croaked, and birds roosting in the trees were disturbed by their presence and fluttered about. The fat boy wore heavy overalls and his fat legs rubbed against each other. The rough cloth made a queer creaking sound. He spoke passionately. “I would like to hold a woman, tight, tight, tight,” he said.
One Sunday the thresherman took his entire crew with him to a church. They had been working near a village called Castalia, but did not go into the town but to a small white frame church that stood amid trees and by a stream at the side of a road, a mile north of the village. They went on Tom’s water wagon, from which they had lifted the tank and placed boards for seats. The boy drove the horses.
Many teams were tied in the shade under the trees in a little grove near the church, and strange men—farmers and their sons—stood about in little groups and talked of the season’s crops. Although it was hot, a breeze played among the leaves of the trees under which they stood, and back of the church and the grove the stream ran over stones and made a persistent soft murmuring noise that arose above the hum of voices.
In the church Tom sat beside the fat boy who stared at the country girls as they came in and who, after the sermon began, went to sleep while Tom listened eagerly to the sermon. The minister, an old man with a beard and a strong sturdy body, looked, he thought not unlike his employer Bottsford the thresherman.
The minister in the country church talked of that time when Mary Magdalene, the woman who had been taken in adultery, was being stoned by the crowd of men who had forgotten their own sins and when, in the tale the minister told, Jesus approached and rescued the woman Tom’s heart thumped with excitement. Then later the minister talked of how Jesus was tempted by the devil, as he stood on a high place in the mountain, but the boy did not listen. He leaned forward and looked out through a window across fields and the minister’s words came to him but in broken sentences. Tom took what was said concerning the temptation on the mountain to mean that Mary had followed Jesus and had offered her body to him, and that afternoon, when he had returned with the others to the farm where they were to begin threshing on the next morning, he called the fat boy aside and asked his opinion.
The two boys walked across a field of wheat-stubble and sat down on a log in a grove of trees. It had never occurred to Tom that a man could be tempted by a woman. It had always seemed to him that it must be the other way, that women must always be tempted by men. “I thought men always asked,” he said, “and now it seems that women sometimes do the asking. That would be a fine thing if it could happen to us. Don’t you think so?”
The two boys arose and walked under the trees and dark shadows began to form on the ground underfoot. Tom burst into words and continually asked questions and the fat boy, who had been often to church and for whom the figure of Jesus had lost most of its reality, felt a little embarrassed. He did not think the subject should be thus freely discussed and when Tom’s mind kept playing with the notion of Jesus, pursued and tempted by a woman, he grunted his disapproval. “Do you think he really refused?” Tom asked over and over. The fat boy tried to explain. “He had twelve disciples,” he said. “It couldn’t have happened. They were always about. Well, you see, she wouldn’t ever have had no chance. Wherever he went they went with him. They were men he was teaching to preach. One of them later betrayed him to soldiers who killed him.”
Tom wondered. “How did that come about? How could a man like that be betrayed?” he asked. “By a kiss,” the fat boy replied.
On the evening of the day when Tom Edwards—for the first and last time in his life—went into a church, there was a light shower, the only one that fell upon John Bottsford’s threshing crew during the last three months the Welsh boy was with them and the shower in no way interfered with their work. The shower came up suddenly and a few minutes was gone. As it was Sunday and as there was no work the men had all gathered in the barn and were looking out through the open barn doors. Two or three men from the farm house came and sat with them on boxes and barrels on the barn floor and, as is customary with country people, very little was said. The men took knives out of their pockets and finding little sticks among the rubbish on the barn floor began to whittle, while the old thresherman went restlessly about with his hands in his trouser pockets. Tom who sat near the door, where an occasional drop of rain was blown against his cheek, alternately looked from his employer to the open country where the rain played over the fields. One of the farmers remarked that a rainy time had come on and that there would be no good threshing weather for several days and, while the thresherman did not answer, Tom saw his lips move and his grey beard bob up and down. He thought the thresherman was protesting but did not want to protest in words.
As they had gone about the country many rains had passed to the north, south and east of the threshing crew and on some days the clouds hung over them all day, but no rain fell and when they had got to a new place they were told it had rained there three days before. Sometimes when they left a farm Tom stood up on the seat of his water wagon and looked back. He looked across fields to where they had been at work and then looked up into the sky. “The rain may come now. The threshing is done and the wheat is all in the barn. The rain can now do no harm to our labor,” he thought.
On the Sunday evening when he sat with the men on the floor of the barn Tom was sure that the shower that had now come would be but a passing affair. He thought his employer must be very close to Jesus, who controlled the affairs of the heavens, and that a long rain would not come because the thresherman did not want it. He fell into a deep reverie and John Bottsford came and stood close beside him. The thresherman put his hand against the door jamb and looked out and Tom could still see the grey beard moving. The man was praying and was so close to himself that his trouser leg touched Tom’s hand. Into the boy’s mind came the remembrance of how John Bottsford had prayed at night on the barn floor. On that very morning he had prayed. It was just as daylight came and the boy was awakened because, as he crept across the hay to descend the ladder, the old man’s foot had touched his hand.
As always Tom had been excited and wanted to hear every word said in the older man’s prayers. He lay tense, listening to every sound that came up from below. A faint glow of light came into the hayloft, through a crack in the side of the barn, a rooster crowed and some pigs, housed in a pen near the barn, grunted l
oudly. They had heard the thresherman moving about and wanted to be fed and their grunting, and the occasional restless movement of a horse or a cow in the stable below, prevented Tom’s hearing very distinctly. He, however, made out that his employer was thanking Jesus for the fine weather that had attended them and was protesting that he did not want to be selfish in asking it to continue. “Jesus,” he said, “send, if you wish, a little shower on this day when, because of our love for you, we do not work in the fields. Let it be fine tomorrow but today, after we have come back from the house of worship, let a shower freshen the land.”
As Tom sat on a box near the door of the barn and saw how aptly the words of his employer had been answered by Jesus he knew that the rain would not last. The man for whom he worked seemed to him so close to the throne of God that he raised the hand, that had been touched by John Bottsford’s trouser leg to his lips and secretly kissed it—and when he looked again out over the fields the clouds were being blown away by a wind and the evening sun was coming out. It seemed to him that the young and beautiful god Jesus must be right at hand, within hearing of his voice. “He is,” Tom told himself, “standing behind a tree in the orchard.” The rain stopped and he went silently out of the barn, towards a small apple orchard that lay beside the farm house, but when he came to a fence and was about to climb over he stopped. “If Jesus is there he will not want me to find him,” he thought. As he turned again toward the barn he could see, across a field, a low grass-covered hill. He decided that Jesus was not after all in the orchard. The long slanting rays of the evening sun fell on the crest of the hill and touched with light the grass stalks, heavy with drops of rain and for a moment the hill was crowned as with a crown of jewels. A million tiny drops of water, reflecting the light, made the hilltop sparkle as though set with gems. “Jesus is there,” muttered the boy. “He lies on his belly in the grass. He is looking at me over the edge of the hill.”
CHAPTER II
JOHN BOTTSFORD went with his threshing crew to work for a large farmer named Barton near the town of Sandusky. The threshing season was drawing near an end and the days remained clear, cool and beautiful. The country into which he now came made a deep impression on Tom’s mind and he never forgot the thoughts and experiences that came to him during the last weeks of that summer on the Barton farms.
The traction engine, puffing forth smoke and attracting the excited attention of dogs and children as it rumbled along and pulled the heavy red grain separator, had trailed slowly over miles of road and had come down almost to Lake Erie. Tom, with the fat Bottsford boy sitting beside him on the water wagon, followed the rumbling puffing engine, and when they came to the new place, where they were to stay for several days, he could see, from the wagon seat, the smoke of the factories in the town of Sandusky rising into the clear morning air.
The man for whom John Bottsford was threshing owned three farms, one on an island in the bay, where he lived, and two on the mainland, and the larger of the mainland farms had great stacks of wheat standing in a field near the barns. The farm was in a wide basin of land, very fertile, through which a creek flowed northward into Sandusky Bay and, besides the stacks of wheat in the basin, other stacks had been made in the upland fields beyond the creek, where a country of low hills began. From these latter fields the waters of the bay could be seen glistening in the bright fall sunlight and steamers went from Sandusky to a pleasure resort called Cedar Point. When the wind blew from the north or west and when the threshing machinery had been stopped at the noon hour the men, resting with their backs against a straw-stack, could hear a band playing on one of the steamers.
Fall came on early that year and the leaves on the trees in the forests that grew along the roads that ran down through the low creek bottom lands began to turn yellow and red. In the afternoons when Tom went to the creek for water he walked beside his horses and the dry leaves crackled and snapped underfoot.
As the season had been a prosperous one Bottsford decided that his youngest son should attend school in town during the fall and winter. He had bought himself a machine for cutting firewood and with his two older sons intended to take up that work. “The logs will have to be hauled out of the wood lots to where we set up the saws,” he said to Tom. “You can come with us if you wish.”
The thresherman began to talk to Tom of the value of learning. “You’d better go to some town yourself this winter. It would be better for you to get into a school,” he said sharply. He grew excited and walked up and down beside the water wagon, on the seat of which Tom sat listening and said that God had given men both minds and bodies and it was wicked to let either decay because of neglect. “I have watched you,” he said. “You don’t talk very much but you do plenty of thinking, I guess. Go into the schools. Find out what the books have to say. You don’t have to believe when they say things that are lies.”
The Bottsford family lived in a rented house facing a stone road near the town of Bellevue, and the fat boy was to go to that town—a distance of some eighteen miles from where the men were at work—afoot, and on the evening before he set out he and Tom went out of the barns intending to have a last walk and talk together on the roads.
They went along in the dusk of the fall evening, each thinking his own thoughts, and coming to a bridge that led over the creek in the valley sat on the bridge rail. Tom had little to say but his companion wanted to talk about women and, when darkness came on, the embarrassment he felt regarding the subject went quite away and he talked boldly and freely. He said that in the town of Bellevue, where he was to live and attend school during the coming winter, he would be sure to get in with a woman. “I’m not going to be cheated out of that chance,” he declared. He explained that as his father would be away from home when he moved into town he would be free to pick his own place to board.
The fat boy’s imagination became inflamed and he told Tom his plans. “I won’t try to get in with any young girl,” he declared shrewdly. “That only gets a fellow in a fix. He might have to marry her. I’ll go live in a house with a widow, that’s what I’ll do. And in the evening the two of us will be there alone. We’ll begin to talk and I’ll keep touching her with my hands. That will get her excited.”
The fat boy jumped to his feet and walked back and forth on the bridge. He was nervous and a little ashamed and wanted to justify what he had said. The thing for which he hungered had he thought become a possibility—an act half achieved. Coming to stand before Tom he put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll go into her room at night,” he declared. “I’ll not tell her I’m coming, but will creep in when she is asleep. Then I’ll get down on my knees by her bed and I’ll kiss her, hard, hard. I’ll hold her tight, so she can’t get away and I’ll kiss her mouth till she wants what I want. Then I’ll stay in her house all winter. No one will know. Even if she won’t have me I’ll only have to move, I’m sure to be safe. No one will believe what she says, if she tells on me. I’m not going to be like a boy any more, I’ll tell you what—I’m as big as a man and I’m going to do like men do, that’s what I am.”
The two young men went back to the barn where they were to sleep on the hay. The rich farmer for whom they were now at work had a large house and provided beds for the thresherman and his two older sons but the two younger men slept in the barn loft and on the night before had lain under one blanket. After the talk by the bridge however, Tom did not feel very comfortable and that stout exponent of manhood, the younger Bottsford, was also embarrassed. In the road the young man, whose name was Paul, walked a little ahead of his companion and when they got to the barn each sought a separate place in the loft. Each wanted to have thoughts into which he did not want the presence of the other to intrude.
For the first time Tom’s body burned with eager desire for a female. He lay where he could see out through a crack, in the side of the barn, and at first his thoughts were all about animals. He had brought a horse blanket up from the stable below and crawling under it lay on his side with his eyes c
lose to the crack and thought about the love-making of horses and cattle. Things he had seen in the stables when he worked for Whitehead, the racing man, came back to his mind and a queer animal hunger ran through him so that his legs stiffened. He rolled restlessly about on the hay and for some reason, he did not understand, his lust took the form of anger and he hated the fat boy. He thought he would like to crawl over the hay and pound his companion’s face with his fists. Although he had not seen Paul Bottsford’s face, when he talked of the widow, he had sensed in him a flavor of triumph. “He thinks he has got the better of me,” young Edwards thought.
He rolled again to the crack and stared out into the night. There was a new moon and the fields were dimly outlined and clumps of trees, along the road that led into the town of Sandusky, looked like black clouds that had settled down over the land. For some reason the sight of the land, lying dim and quiet under the moon, took all of his anger away and he began to think, not of Paul Bottsford, with hot eager lust in his eyes, creeping into the room of the widow at Bellevue, but of the god Jesus, going up into a mountain with his woman, Mary.
His companion’s notion of going into a room where a woman lay sleeping and taking her, as it were unawares, now seemed to him entirely mean and the hot jealous feeling that had turned into anger and hatred went entirely away. He tried to think what the god, who had brought the beautiful days for the threshing, would do with a woman.
