Sherwood Anderson

by Collected Stories- Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses

  He was dirty and unkempt as the old man had been and as the child was.

  At any rate she was not afraid of me. “Hello, you are back here,” she said. Her voice was clear.

  Just the same I saw the hatred in her eyes. I asked about the fishing. “Are the trout biting?” I asked. She had come nearer me now, and the young man had slouched back into the house.

  Again I am at a loss about how to reproduce her mountain speech. It is peculiar. So much is in the voice.

  Hers was cold and clear and filled with hatred.

  “How should I know? He” (indicating with a gesture of her hand the tall slouching figure who had gone into the house) “is too damn’ lazy to fish.

  “He’s too damn’ lazy for anything on earth.”

  She was glaring at me.

  “Well,” I thought, “I will at least try to give her the money.” I took the bill in my hand and held it toward her. “You will need some clothes,” I said. “Take it and buy yourself some clothes.”

  It may have been that I had touched her mountain pride. How am I to know? The look of hatred in her eyes seemed to grow more intense.

  “You go to hell,” she said. “You get out of here. And don’t you come back in here again.”

  She was looking hard at me when she said this. If you have never known such people, who live like that, “on the outer fringe of life,” as we writers say (you may see them sometimes in the tenement districts of cities as well as in the lonely and lovely hills)—such a queer look of maturity in the eyes of a child. . . .

  It sends a shiver through you. Such a child knows too much and not enough. Before she went back into the house she turned and spoke to me again. It was about my money.

  She told me to put it somewhere, I won’t say where. The most modern of modern writers has to use some discretion.

  Then she went into the house. That was all. I left. What was I to do? After all, a man looks after his hide. In spite of the trout I did not go fishing in that hollow again.

  A Sentimental Journey

  * * *

  MY friend David, with his wife, Mildred, came to live in the hills. She was a delicate little woman. I used to go often to the cabin they had rented. Although David is a scholar, he and a mountain man, named Joe, a man much older than David, became friends. I sat in their cabin one evening, after I had first met David, while he told me the story. Joe was not there and Mildred was in the kitchen at work.

  Joe is a thin mountain man of forty with the straight wiry figure of a young boy. David spoke of the first time he ever saw the man. He said: “I remember that he frightened me. It was a day last Fall, when we had first come in here, and I was on the gray horse riding the hills.

  “I was a little nervous. You know how it is. Romantic tales of mountain men shooting strangers from behind trees or from wooded mountain-sides floated through my mind. Suddenly, out of an old timber road, barely discernible, leading off up into the hills, he emerged.

  “He was mounted on a beautifully gaited but bony bay horse, and while I admired the horse’s gait I feared the rider.

  “What a fierce-looking man! Stories of men taken for Federal agents and killed by such fellows on lonely roads became suddenly real. His face was long and lean and he had a huge nose. His thin cheeks had not been shaved for weeks. He had on, I remember, an old wide-brimmed black hat, pulled well down over his eyes, and the eyes were cold and gray. The eyes stared at me. They were as cold as the gray sky overhead.

  “Out of the thick golden-brown trees, well up the side of the mountain down which Joe had just come, I saw a thin column of smoke floating up into the sky. ‘He has a still up there,’ I thought. I felt myself in a dangerous position.

  “Joe rode past me without speaking. My horse stood motionless in the road. I did not dare take my eyes off the man. ‘He will shoot me in the back,’ I thought. What a silly notion! My hands were trembling. ‘Well,’ I thought. ‘Howdy,’ said Joe.

  “Stopping the bay horse he waited for me and we rode together down the mountain-side. He was curious about me. As to whether he had a still concealed in the woods I do not now know and I haven’t asked. No doubt he had.

  “And so Joe the mountain-man rode with me to my house here. (It was a log cabin built on the bank of a creek.) Mildred was inside cooking dinner. When we got to the little bridge that crosses the creek I looked at the man who had ridden beside me for half an hour without speaking and he looked at me. ‘’Light,’ I said, ‘and come in and eat.’ We walked across the bridge toward the house. The night was turning cold. Before we entered the house he touched my arm gently with his long bony hand. He made a motion for me to stop and took a bottle from his coat pocket. I took a sip, but it was raw new stuff and burned my throat. It seemed to me that Joe took a half pint in one great gulp. ‘It’s new, he’ll get drunk,’ I thought, ‘he’ll raise hell in the house.’ I was afraid for Mildred. She had been ill. That was the reason we had come up here, into this country.

  “We were sitting here in the house by the fireplace here and could look through that open door. While we ate Mildred was nervous and kept looking at Joe with frightened eyes. There was the open door there, and Joe looked through it and into his hills. Darkness was coming on fast and in the hills a strong wind blew, but it did not come down into this valley. The air above was filled with floating yellow and red leaves. The room here was heavy with late Fall smells and the smell of moon whisky. That was Joe’s breath.

  “He was curious about my typewriter and the row of books on the shelves up there along the wall, but the fact that we were living in this old log house put him at his ease. We were not too grand. Mountain men are, as a rule, as you know, uncommunicative, but it turned out that Joe is a talker. He wanted to talk. He said that he had been wanting to come and see us for a long time. Someone had told him we were from distant parts, that we had seen the ocean and foreign lands. He had himself always wanted to go wandering in the big world but had been afraid. The idea of his being frightened of anything seemed absurd. I glanced at Mildred and we both smiled. We were feeling easier.

  “And now Joe began to talk to us of his one attempt to go out of these mountains and into the outside world. It hadn’t been successful. He was a hill man and could not escape the hills, had been raised in the hills and had never learned to read or write. He got up and fingered one of my books cautiously and then sat down again. ‘Oh, Lord,’ I thought, ‘the man is lucky.’ I had just read the book he had touched and after the glowing blurb on the jacket it had been a bitter disappointment.

  “He told us that he had got married when he was sixteen and suggested vaguely that there was a reason. There often is, I guess, among these mountain people. Although he is yet a young man he is the father of fourteen children. Back in the hills somewhere he owned a little strip of land, some twenty acres, on which he raised corn. Most of the corn, I fancy, goes into whisky. A man who has fourteen children and but twenty acres of land has to scratch hard to live. I imagined that the coming of Prohibition and the rise in the price of moon has been a big help to him.

  “That first evening his being with us started his mind reaching out into the world. He began talking of the journey he had once taken—that time he tried to escape from the hills.

  “It was when he had been married but a short time and had but six children. Suddenly he decided to go out of the hills and into the broad world. Leaving his wife and five of the children at home in his mountain cabin, he set out—taking with him the oldest, a boy of seven.

  “He said he did it because his corn crop had failed and his two hogs had died. It was an excuse. He really wanted to travel. He had a bony horse, and taking the boy on behind him he set out over the hills. I gathered that he had taken the boy because he was afraid he would be too lonely in the big world without some of his family. It was late Fall and the boy had no shoes.

  “They went through the hills and down into a plain and then on into other hills and came at last to a coal-mining
town where there were also factories. It was a large town. Joe got a job in the mines at once and he got good wages. It must have been a good year. He had never made so much money before. He told us, as though it were a breath-taking statement, that he made four dollars a day.

  “It did not cost him much to live. He and the boy slept on the floor in a miner’s cabin. The house in which they slept must have belonged to an Italian. Joe spoke of the people with whom he lived as ‘Tallies.’

  “And there was Joe, the mountain man, in the big world and he was afraid. There were the noises in the house at night. Joe and the boy were accustomed to the silence of the hills. In another room, during the evenings, men gathered and sat talking. They drank and began to sing. Sometimes they fought. They seemed as strange and terrible to Joe and his son as these mountain people had seemed at first to Mildred and myself. At night he came home from the mine, having bought some food at a store, and then he and the boy sat on a bench and ate. There were tears of loneliness in the boy’s eyes. Joe hadn’t put him in school. None of his children ever went to school. He was ashamed. He was only staying in the mining country to make money. His curiosity about the outside world was quite gone. How sweet these distant hills now seemed to him!

  “On the streets of the mining town crowds of men were going along. There was a huge factory with grim-looking walls. What a noise it made! It kept going night and day. The air was filled with black smoke. Freight trains were always switching up and down a siding near the house where Joe and the boy lay on the floor, under the patched quilts they had brought with them from the hills.

  “And then winter came. It snowed and froze and then snowed again. In the hills now the snow would be ten feet deep in places. Joe was hungry for its whiteness. He was working in the mines but he said he did not know how to get his money at the week’s end. He was shy about asking. You had to go to a certain office where they had your name on a book. Joe said he did not know where it was.

  “At last he found out. What a lot of money he had! Clutching it in his hand he went to the miner’s house and got the boy. They had left the horse with a small farmer across the plain at the place where the hills began.

  “They went there that evening, wading through the deep snow. It was bitter cold. I asked Joe if he had got shoes for the boy and he said ‘no.’ He said that by the time he got ready to start back into the hills it was night and the stores were closed. He figured he had enough money to buy a hog and some corn. He could go back to making whisky, back to these hills. Both he and the boy were half insane with desire.

  “He cut up one of the quilts and made a covering for the boy’s feet. Sitting in our house here, as the darkness came, he described the journey.

  “It was an oddly dramatic recital. Joe had the gift. There was really no necessity for his starting off in such a rush. He might have waited until the roads were broken after the great snow.

  “The only explanation he could give us was that he could not wait and the boy was sick with loneliness.

  “And so, since he had been a boy, Joe had wanted to see the outside world, and now, having seen it, he wanted back his hills. He spoke of the happiness of himself and the boy trudging in the darkness in the deep snow.

  “There was his woman in his cabin some eighty miles away in the hills. What of her? No one in the family could read or write. She might be getting out of wood. It was absurd. Such mountain women can fell trees as well as a man.

  “It was all sentimentality on Joe’s part. He knew that. At midnight he and the boy reached the cabin where they had left the horse and getting on the horse rode all of that night. When they were afraid they would freeze they got off the horse and struggled forward afoot. Joe said it warmed them up.

  “They kept it up like that all the way home. Occasionally they came to a mountain cabin where there was a fire.

  “Joe said the trip took three days and three nights and that he lost his way but he had no desire to sleep. The boy and the horse had, however, to have rest. At one place, while the boy slept on the floor of a mountain house before a fire and the horse ate and rested in a stable, Joe sat up with another mountain man and played cards from after midnight until four in the morning. He said he won two dollars.

  “All the people in the mountain cabins on the way welcomed him and there was but one house where he had trouble. Looking at Mildred and myself, Joe smiled when he spoke of that night. It was when he had lost his way and had got down out of the hills and into a valley. The people of that house were outsiders. They were not hill people. I fancy they were afraid of Joe, as Mildred and I had been afraid, and that being afraid they had wanted to close the door on him and the boy.

  “When he stopped at the house and called from the road a man put his head out at a window and told him to go away. The boy was almost frozen. Joe laughed. It was two in the morning.

  “What he did was to take the boy in his arms and walk to the front door. Then he put his shoulder to the door and pushed. He got in. There was a little fireplace in a large front room and he went through the house to the back door and got wood.

  “The man and his wife, dressed, Joe said, like city folks—that is to say, evidently in night clothes, pajamas perhaps—came to the door of a bedroom and looked at him. What he looked like, standing there in the firelight with the old hat pulled down over his face—the long lean face and the cold eyes—you may imagine.

  “He stayed in the house three hours, warming himself and the boy. He went into a stable and fed the horse. The people in the house never showed themselves again. They had taken the one look at Joe and then going quickly back into the bedroom had closed and locked the door.

  “Joe was curious. He said it was a grand house. I gathered it was much grander than my place. The whole inside of the house, he said, was like one big grand piece of furniture. Joe went into the kitchen but would not touch the food he found. He said he reckoned the people of the house were higher toned than we were. They were, he said, so high and mighty that he would not touch their food. What they were doing with such a house in that country he did not know. In some places, in the valleys among the hills, he said high-toned people like us were now coming in. He looked at Mildred and smiled when he said that.

  “And, anyway, as Joe said, the people of the grand house evidently did not have any better food than he sometimes had at home. He had been curious and had gone into the kitchen and the pantry to look. I looked at Mildred. I was glad he had seemed to like our food.

  “And so Joe and the boy were warmed and the horse was fed and they left the house as they had found it, the two strange people, who might also have heard or read tales of the dangerous character of mountain people, trembling in the room in which they had locked themselves.

  “They got, Joe said, to their own house late on the next evening and they were almost starved. The snow had grown deeper. After the first heavy snow there had been a rain followed by sleet and then came more snow. In some of the mountain passes he and the boy had to go ahead of the horse, breaking the way.

  “They got home at last and Joe did nothing but sleep for two days. He said the boy was all right. He also slept. Joe tried to explain to us that he had taken the desperate trip out of the mining country back into his own hills in such a hurry because he was afraid his wife, back in her cabin in the hills, would be out of firewood, but when he said it he had to smile.

  “‘Pshaw,’ he said, grinning sheepishly, ‘there was plenty of wood in the house.’”

  A Jury Case

  * * *

  THEY had a still up in the mountains. There were three of them. They were all tough.

  What I mean is they were not men to fool with—at least two of them weren’t.

  First of all, there was Harvey Groves. Old man Groves had come into the mountain country thirty years before, and had bought a lot of mountain land.

  He hadn’t a cent and had only made a small payment on the land.

  Right away he began to make moon whisky.
He was one of the kind that can make pretty fair whisky out of anything. They make whisky out of potatoes, buckwheat, rye, corn or whatever they can get—the ones who really know how. One of that kind from here was sent to prison. He made whisky out of the prunes they served the prisoners for breakfast—anyway, he called it whisky. Old man Groves used to sell his whisky down at the lumber mills. There was a big cutting going on over on Briar Top Mountain.

  They brought the lumber down the mountain to a town called Lumberville.

  Old Groves sold his whisky to the lumberjacks and the manager of the mill got sore. He had old Groves into his office and tried to tell him what was what.

  Instead, old Groves told him something. The manager said he would turn old Groves up. What he meant was that he would send the Federal men up the mountains after him, and old Groves told the manager that if a Federal man showed up in his hills he would burn the lumber stacked high about the mills at Lumberville.

  He said it and he meant it and the mill manager knew he meant it.

  The old man got away with that. He stayed up in his hills and raised a large family. Those at home were all boys. Every one about here speaks of the Groves girls, but what became of them I’ve never heard. They are not here now.

  Harvey Groves was a tall, raw-boned young man with one eye. He lost the other one in a fight. He began drinking and raising the devil all over the hills when he was little more than a boy and after the old man died of a cancer, and the old woman died and the land was divided among the sons and sold, and he got his share, he blew it in gambling and drinking.

  He went moonshining when he was twenty-five. Cal Long and George Small went in with him. They all chipped in to buy the still.

  Nowadays you can make moon whisky in a small still—it’s called “over-night stuff”—about fourteen gallons to the run, and you make a run in one night.

  You can sell it fast. There are plenty of men to buy and run it into the coal mining country over east of here. It’s pretty raw stuff.