Sherwood Anderson

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

  “Who would milk our cows?” Hatch said.

  The idea of anyone but him or his wife touching one of the Hutchenson cows seemed to hurt him. While he was alive he didn’t want anyone else plowing one of his fields, tending his corn, looking after things about the barn. He felt that way about his farm. It was a thing you couldn’t explain, Hal said. He seemed to understand the two old people. . . .

  * * *

  It was a spring night, past midnight, when Hal came to my house and told me the news. In our town we have a night telegraph operator at the railroad station and Hal had got a wire. It was really addressed to Hatch Hutchenson, but the operator brought it to Hal. Will Hutchenson was dead, had been killed. It turned out later that he was on a party with some other young fellows and there might have been some drinking. Anyway, the car was wrecked and Will Hutchenson was killed. The operator wanted Hal to go out and take the message to Hatch and his wife, and Hal wanted me to go along.

  I offered to take my car but Hal said no. “Let’s walk out,” he said. He wanted to put off the moment, I could see that. So we did walk. It was early spring and I remember every moment of the silent walk we took, the little leaves just coming on the trees, the little streams we crossed, how the moonlight made the water seem alive. We loitered and loitered, not talking, hating to go on.

  * * *

  Then we got out there and Hal went to the front door of the farmhouse, while I stayed in the road. I heard a dog bark, away off somewhere. I heard a child crying in some distant house. I think that Hal, after he got to the front door of the house, must have stood there for ten minutes, hating to knock.

  Then he did knock, and the sound his fist made on the door seemed terrible. It seemed like guns going off. Old Hatch came to the door and I heard Hal tell him. I know what happened. Hal had been trying, all the way out from town, to think up words to tell the old couple in some gentle way; but when it came to the scratch he couldn’t. He blurted everything right out, right into old Hatch’s face.

  That was all. Old Hatch didn’t say a word. The door was opened, he stood there in the moonlight, wearing a funny long white nightshirt. Hal told him, and the door went shut again with a bang and Hal was left standing there.

  He stood for a time, and then came back out into the road to me. “Well,” he said, and “Well,” I said. We stood in the road looking and listening. There wasn’t a sound from the house.

  And then—it might have been ten minutes or it might have been a half-hour—we stood silently listening and watching, not knowing what to do; we couldn’t go away. . . . “I guess they are trying to get so they can believe it,” Hal whispered to me. I got his notion all right. The two old people must have thought of their son Will always only in terms of life, never of death.

  We stood watching and listening, and then, suddenly, after a long time, Hal touched me on the arm. “Look,” he whispered.

  There were two white-clad figures going from the house to the barn. It turned out, you see, that old Hatch had been plowing that day. He had finished plowing and harrowing a field near the barn.

  The two figures went into the barn and presently came out. They went into the field, and Hal and I crept across the farmyard to the barn, and got to where we could see what was going on without being seen.

  It was an incredible thing. The old man had got a hand corn-planter out of the barn and his wife had got a bag of seed corn, and there, in the moonlight, that night, after they got that news, they were planting corn.

  It was a thing to curl your hair—it was so ghostly. They were both in their night clothes. They would do a row across the field, coming quite close to us as we stood in the shadow of the barn, and then, at the end of each row, they would kneel side by side by the fence and stay silent for a time. The whole thing went on in silence.

  * * *

  It was the first time in my life I ever understood something, and I am far from sure now that I can put down what I understood and felt that night . . . I mean something about the connection between certain people and the earth—a kind of silent cry, down into the earth, of those two old people, putting corn down into the earth. It was as though they were putting death down into the ground that life might grow again, something like that.

  They must have been asking something of the earth, too. But what’s the use? What they were up to in connection with the life in their field and the lost life in their son is something you can’t very well make clear in words. All I know is that Hal and l stood the sight as long as we could, and then we crept away and went back to town.

  But Hatch Hutchenson and his wife must have got what they were after that night, because Hal told me that when he went out in the morning to see them and to make the arrangements for bringing their dead son home, they were both curiously quiet and, Hal thought, in command of themselves. Hal said he thought they had got something. “They have their farm and they have still got Will’s letters to read,” Hal said.

  Feud

  * * *

  JOHN LAMPSON and Dave Rivers had been friends when they were boys and young men, but they got into a fight, and then later John Lampson died. Dave was ashamed because, after the fight he had with John, he didn’t go to him and try to make it up. A long time afterwards, and just because he was ashamed, he took it out on John’s son. There were really two fights between John and Dave. When they were both young men they went out of the hill country of eastern Tennessee to work together in the West Virginia coal mines.

  They both had the same thing in mind. They didn’t want to be coal miners. What they wanted was to make enough money in the mines to come back into the hills and buy farms. A good many hillmen do that. When they are young they go off to the mines or to a factory town. They work hard and save money, and then they come back. A hillman is a hillman. He doesn’t want to live his life away from the hills.

  You may know how miners work. Two men work together in a little room far down under the ground. It is dangerous work, and a man must have faith in his partner. Any little slip, a moment of carelessness on the part of one man, and both he and his partner may be killed.

  So there are these friendships that spring up between miners. “Here I am, working with you, day after day. I am going around with your life held in the hollow of my hand.” Such an experience makes two men feel close. Dave and John, both powerful men and both unmarried, had such a friendship.

  And then John and Dave fought. They fought over a woman met in a West Virginia town, and I don’t know much of that side of their story. They fought once underground and once on the main street of a mining town. As it happened, neither man got the woman. She married another miner and left the town in which they were working.

  They fought twice, and Dave Rivers won both fights, and then they quit working together, but both stayed on in the same town.

  I think later that when both men got home to the hills and each man got his own little farm in the same neighborhood and had married—it happened that they married second cousins—I think that both men wanted to make it up but that neither man would make the first move. “He began it,” Dave Rivers said to himself. “Well, he licked me,” John Lampson said. The result was a growing resentment. The two wives kept at them and both men were stubborn. . . .

  * * *

  But this story is not concerned primarily with two men. It concerns John Lampson’s son, Jim Lampson, and Dave Rivers’ daughter, Elvira.

  In the hill country girls often get married at sixteen, and at that age young men push out into the world. Jim Lampson is a sensitive, rather slender man and he began paying court to Dave’s daughter, Elvira.

  It happens that I know about the courtship, for two reasons. I am fond of taking long walks alone in the hills, and one night I saw the two walking together hand in hand on a mountain road. And then young Jim sometimes talks to me. He is ambitious. He wants an education, and sometimes comes to me to borrow books. It was young Jim who told me what had happened between himself and Dave Rivers. His vo
ice shook when he told me the story.

  Jim is in love with Elvira and he got bold. It was Sunday, and he went to Dave Rivers’ house, and there was Dave all dressed up and sitting on the porch.

  “What do you want?” Dave asked gruffly, addressing young Jim.

  Jim said that Dave didn’t even let him come into the yard. He stood at the gate. It has been only a year since Jim’s father died. A wild colt he was trying to break bolted with him.

  Young Jim stood in the road and told Dave Rivers that he wanted to come into the house and call on his daughter Elvira, and Elvira, a slim, lovely mountain girl, was standing in the house doorway back of her father. She stood listening. Dave got suddenly furious. He was, I am pretty sure now, really furious that he hadn’t made it up with Jim’s father before his old coal-mining partner got killed. He was furious at himself, and he took it out on young Jim.

  He began to rave and swear at Jim. Then he ran into the house and got his gun. He waved it about and kept on cursing: “You get out of here! You are the son of that skunk. You get out of here!”

  It was all very absurd. I am sure that Dave Rivers’ gun wasn’t loaded.

  But when he talked to me young Jim was furious. Jim isn’t one of the noisy sort. That day, after standing for a moment in the road and listening to Dave Rivers curse him and his father, Jim went white and, turning, walked trembling away.

  This happened late of a Sunday afternoon in the fall, and it also happened that on that same evening I went for a walk. It might have been ten at night, and there was a moon. I went along up hill and down. It was a fine night. I was listening to the night sounds, getting the night smell. Dave Rivers’ house is just at the foot of a sharp hill and there is a wood above the house along the road. The edge of the wood is not more than a hundred yards from the house. Dave was sitting in the open doorway.

  I moved into the wood by the fence and stood thinking of what Jim Lampson had told me that afternoon. “I’ll go down and talk to him,” I thought. I do not know Dave Rivers as I do young Jim, but Dave had said things about Jim’s father I know he couldn’t mean, and I had said so to young Jim. I had tried to quiet Jim.

  “I’ll go talk to Dave Rivers tomorrow,” I had said to Jim; but, “I had better do it right now,” I told myself as I stood that night above the house. I hesitated. There was a lamp burning in the room at Dave Rivers’ back. The man was doing what I had been doing, enjoying the night. Was he thinking of what he had done to young Jim’s father and of what he had on that day done to young Jim?

  I stood hesitant. There is a man’s natural inclination not to interfere in other men’s quarrels. “I’m going to do it,” I said to myself, and then it was too late. It may be that I heard a little sound or that some instinct told me to turn my head.

  In the road, twenty feet away, was young Jim, who had come silently up, and he had a gun in his hands and it was aimed at Dave Rivers. Dave was a fair target, down there in the light from the lamp.

  It was a thing to give you the shivers down to your toes. Why I didn’t shout or run to young Jim I don’t know. I stood frozen and silent. Of what does a man think at such moments? Did I see all that was about to happen—Dave Rivers shot by young Jim—my own position, a witness—Jim, a boy I liked—myself running afterwards to report it all to the sheriff? And then later the trial in the courtroom in town—my words sending young Jim to his death on the gallows.

  But, thank heaven, it did not happen. Young Jim stood like that, his hand on the trigger of his gun, myself hidden from sight in the shadow of a tree, Dave Rivers sitting down there, smoking his pipe and unaware of it all; and then young Jim lowered his gun. After standing for a moment he turned and walked away. . . .

  * * *

  And so that happened, and you can see how I felt. “I’ll go down to Dave Rivers and talk to him now,” I told myself.

  “No, I won’t do that. I’ll go back up the road to young Jim.”

  Jim lives with his mother on a farm three miles back in the hills. He is his mother’s only child, but Dave Rivers has the daughter Elvira and two younger sons.

  And so I stood in the road, hesitating again, and, as is usual with me, again I did nothing. “Tomorrow,” I said to myself. I went on home, but I did not sleep, and on the next day I went to Dave’s house.

  I went to the house in the late afternoon of a fall day, and there was Dave at work in the barnyard back of the house.

  It was the time for the fall pig-killing, and Dave was at it alone.

  It had turned cold during the night and there was the promise of snow in the air. There was a creek near the barn, and along it red sumac grew. Dave’s wife, his daughter Elvira, and the two younger children were standing and watching. Dave looked up and grunted at me.

  There was a fire still blazing under a kettle but Dave had the hog in the scalding barrel filled with the boiling water. I remember the hill beyond where Dave stood, the fall colors of the trees, the bare black trunks of trees beginning to show through, the two children dancing about. And Elvira, and her slim girlishness.

  “It will snow before the day is over,” I thought.

  How was I to begin on Dave? What would he think of my trying to interfere in one of his quarrels? Dave is a gruff one. He isn’t easy to handle.

  “Hello,” he said, looking up and growling at me. He had the hog by the legs and was turning it about in the barrel of hot water. A hog, when ready for killing, is heavy. . . .

  And then . . . it happened again.

  Young Jim came from among the sumac bushes with his gun in his hand. He had come up along the creek, beyond the barn, and he walked directly to Dave. His face was white. He had made up his mind to kill Dave openly there in the daytime.

  He went directly to Dave, and Dave stood for a moment, staring at him. I saw Elvira put her two hands over her eyes, and a little cry came from her lips. The wife ran toward Dave. Jim brought the gun to his shoulder.

  “Now! Now!” I said to myself. It was a kind of inner cry. I did not speak. The hands of Death were gripping my throat.

  But Death didn’t get Dave. I saw his big shoulders heave and, with a quick movement of his arms, he had the hog out of the barrel, but in doing so he fell. He and the hog were in a sprawling heap on the ground.

  So there he was. In falling he had upset the barrel of boiling water, and it came flooding over his body. He was on the ground, writhing in pain.

  All of this had happened more quickly than thought. The wife had been running toward her husband. She was still running. I saw Elvira take her hands from her eyes. Young Jim had thrown his gun to one side and had got his knife out of his pocket. I still stood helpless.

  “No, no,” I said to myself. For just a moment I thought, “He is going to kill the man with the knife,” but in the next moment I saw my mistake.

  Jim was on his knees beside Dave and was working furiously. He was cutting Dave’s clothes away, and Dave, who had been rolling on the ground and crying with pain, was now very quiet. I saw his eyes as they were watching the boy.

  And so Dave let the boy handle him like a child, and when we had got him into the house I rode Dave’s horse off to town for a doctor. I yelled with delight. I was beating the horse over the flanks with my hat. I had seen the look in Dave’s eyes as he lay on the ground, letting young Jim cut his clothing away, and I knew that the feud, that had begun between Dave and Jim’s father and that Jim had taken up in his turn, was over at last.

  Harry Breaks Through

  * * *

  WHEN the depression came to America in 1929, Harry was ready for it. He might be pounding the pavements in Chicago, trying to get hooked on, as an advertising writer, but he didn’t do much mourning. His son Jim kept slipping him twenties and seemed to have the gift of knowing when his father was down to his last dollar. Harry didn’t have to ask his son. He had two sons and three daughters, and once he said to Frank Blandin—he liked Frank but was doubtful about him—“You haven’t had your change of life yet, ha
ve you, Frank?” he said. Frank liked Harry and admired him but didn’t understand. Harry tried to explain. It was his notion that there was something peculiar about American life and American men. Harry worked for another advertising agency but used to come to Frank’s office to sit talking—this in the boom days in advertising, before the great depression. When he came, he was usually half spiffed. He was a fat, curiously awkward man, always knocking against the side of the door frame as he came in. When he went to sit in a chair, you were afraid he might miss it and fall to the floor.

  Harry was a great reader. He explained to Frank. “What else is there to do on the evenings when I am at home?” He was a married man and lived in a very respectable suburb. Early in life he had married a woman several years older than himself who was a devout Methodist. He had always stayed, outwardly, well hooked into the upper middle class and supported a pew for his family in a suburban church. Such a man had to spend at least three or four evenings a week at home. “What else is there to do but read, if you don’t want to go to the movies or listen in on the radio?” His life as an advertising writer had rather spoiled the radio for him. “I can see what we are coming to,” he said. “Pretty soon they’ll have all the novelists, all the poets, actors, etc.,—to say nothing of the United States Senators—putting on evening talks, sponsored by somebody’s face cream or an automobile tire company, and we guys will have to write their speeches and the introductory spiels for them. ‘Senator Cowhide was a poor boy and has risen to his present great position in American life by his own efforts. Now he is chairman of the important Cucumber Committee of the United States Senate. The Senator is an extremely modest man. He says the opportunities of American life, not any special merit in himself, should be given credit for his rise to fame. He comes to you tonight through the courtesy of Soilless Wash Cloths. B-U-N-K talking from Chicago—the voice of the Future on the Air.’”