So then I crawled up through a hole into the loft above thinking that night was over anyway and glad of it, but it wasn’t, not by a long sight.
As my clothes were all soaking wet and as we race track swipes didn’t own any such things as night-gowns or pajamas I had to go to bed naked, of course.
But we had plenty of horse blankets and so I tucked myself in between a pile of them and tried not to think any more that night. The being with Pick-it-boy and having him close right under me that way made me feel a little better.
Then I was sound asleep and dreaming and—bang like being hit with a club by someone who has sneaked up behind you—I got another wallop.
What I suppose is that, being upset the way I was, I had forgotten to bolt the door to Pick-it-boy’s stall down below and two negro men had come in there, thinking they were in their own place, and had climbed up through the hole where I was. They were half lit up but not what you might call dead drunk, and I suppose they were up against something a couple of white swipes, who had some money in their pockets, wouldn’t have been up against.
What I mean is that a couple of white swipes, having liquored themselves up and being down there in the town on a bat, if they wanted a woman or a couple of women would have been able to find them. There is always a few women of that kind can be found around any town I’ve ever seen or heard of, and of course a bar tender would have given them the tip where to go.
But a negro, up there in that country, where there aren’t any, or anyway mighty few negro women, wouldn’t know what to do when he felt that way and would be up against it.
It’s so always. Burt and several other negroes I’ve known pretty well have talked to me about it, lots of times. You take now a young negro man—not a race track swipe or a tramp or any other low-down kind of a fellow—but, let us say, one who has been to college, and has behaved himself and tried to be a good man, the best he could, and be clean, as they say. He isn’t any better off, is he? If he has made himself some money and wants to go sit in a swell restaurant, or go to hear some good music, or see a good play at the theatre, he gets what we used to call on the tracks, “the messy end of the dung fork,” doesn’t he?
And even in such a low-down place as what people call a “bad house” it’s the same way. The white swipes and others can go into a place where they have negro women fast enough, and they do it too, but you let a negro swipe try it the other way around and see how he comes out.
You see, I can think this whole thing out fairly now, sitting here in my own house and writing, and with my wife Jessie in the kitchen making a pie or something, and I can show just how the two negro men who came into that loft, where I was asleep, were justified in what they did, and I can preach about how the negroes are up against it in this country, like a daisy, but I tell you what, I didn’t think things out that way that night.
For, you understand, what they thought, they being half liquored-up, and when one of them had jerked the blankets off me, was that I was a woman. One of them carried a lantern but it was smoky and dirty and didn’t give out much light. So they must have figured it out—my body being pretty white and slender then, like a young girl’s body I suppose—that some white swipe had brought me up there. The kind of girls around a town that will come with a swipe to a race track on a rainy night aren’t very fancy females but you’ll find that kind in the towns all right. I’ve seen many a one in my day.
And so, I figure, these two big buck niggers, being piped that way, just made up their minds they would snatch me away from the white swipe who had brought me out there, and who had left me lying carelessly around.
“Jes’ you lie still honey. We ain’t gwine hurt you none,” one of them said, with a little chuckling laugh that had something in it besides a laugh, too. It was the kind of laugh that gives you the shivers.
The devil of it was I couldn’t say anything, not even a word. Why I couldn’t yell out and say “What the hell,” and just kid them a little and shoo them out of there I don’t know, but I couldn’t. I tried and tried so that my throat hurt but I didn’t say a word. I just lay there staring at them.
It was a mixed-up night. I’ve never gone through another night like it.
Was I scared? Lord Almighty, I’ll tell you what, I was scared.
Because the two big black faces were leaning right over me now, and I could feel their liquored-up breaths on my cheeks, and their eyes were shining in the dim light from that smoky lantern, and right in the centre of their eyes was that dancing flickering light I’ve told you about your seeing in the eyes of wild animals, when you were carrying a lantern through the woods at night.
It was a puzzler! All my life, you see—me never having had any sisters, and at that time never having had a sweetheart either—I had been dreaming and thinking about women, and I suppose I’d always been dreaming about a pure innocent one, for myself, made for me by God, maybe. Men are that way. No matter how big they talk about “let the women go hang,” they’ve always got that notion tucked away inside themselves, somewhere. It’s a kind of chesty man’s notion, I suppose, but they’ve got it and the kind of up-and-coming women we have nowdays who are always saying, “I’m as good as a man and will do what the men do,” are on the wrong trail if they really ever want to, what you might say “hog-tie” a fellow of their own.
So I had invented a kind of princess, with black hair and a slender willowy body to dream about. And I thought of her as being shy and afraid to ever tell anything she really felt to anyone but just me. I suppose I fancied that if I ever found such a woman in the flesh I would be the strong sure one and she the timid shrinking one.
And now I was that woman, or something like her, myself.
I gave a kind of wriggle, like a fish, you have just taken off the hook. What I did next wasn’t a thought-out thing. I was caught and I squirmed, that’s all.
The two niggers both jumped at me but somehow—the lantern having been kicked over and having gone out the first move they made—well in some way, when they both lunged at me they missed.
As good luck would have it my feet found the hole, where you put hay down to the horse in the stall below, and through which we crawled up when it was time to go to bed in our blankets up in the hay, and down I slid, not bothering to try to find the ladder with my feet but just letting myself go.
In less than a second I was out of doors in the dark and the rain and the two blacks were down the hole and out the door of the stall after me.
How long or how far they really followed me I suppose I’ll never know. It was black dark and raining hard now and a roaring wind had begun to blow. Of course, my body being white, it must have made some kind of a faint streak in the darkness as I ran, and anyway I thought they could see me and I knew I couldn’t see them and that made my terror ten times worse. Every minute I thought they would grab me.
You know how it is when a person is all upset and full of terror as I was. I suppose maybe the two niggers followed me for a while, running across the muddy race track and into the grove of trees that grew in the oval inside the track, but likely enough, after just a few minutes, they gave up the chase and went back, found their own place and went to sleep. They were liquored-up, as I’ve said, and maybe partly funning too.
But I didn’t know that, if they were. As I ran I kept hearing sounds, sounds made by the rain coming down through the dead old leaves left on the trees and by the wind blowing, and it may be that the sound that scared me most of all was my own bare feet stepping on a dead branch and breaking it or something like that.
There was something strange and scary, a steady sound, like a heavy man running and breathing hard, right at my shoulder. It may have been my own breath, coming quick and fast. And I thought I heard that chuckling laugh I’d heard up in the loft, the laugh that sent the shivers right down through me. Of course every tree I came close to looked like a man standing there, ready to grab me, and I kept dodging and going—bang—into other trees. My shoulders kept k
nocking against trees in that way and the skin was all knocked off, and every time it happened I thought a big black hand had come down and clutched at me and was tearing my flesh.
How long it went on I don’t know, maybe an hour, maybe five minutes. But anyway the darkness didn’t let up, and the terror didn’t let up, and I couldn’t, to save my life, scream or make any sound.
Just why I couldn’t I don’t know. Could it be because at the time I was a woman, while at the same time I wasn’t a woman? It may be that I was too ashamed of having turned into a girl and being afraid of a man to make any sound. I don’t know about that. It’s over my head.
But anyway I couldn’t make a sound. I tried and tried and my throat hurt from trying and no sound came.
And then, after a long time, or what seemed like a long time, I got out from among the trees inside the track and was on the track itself again. I thought the two black men were still after me, you understand, and I ran like a madman.
Of course, running along the track that way, it must have been up the back stretch, I came after a time to where the old slaughter-house stood, in that field, beside the track. I knew it by its ungodly smell, scared as I was. Then, in some way, I managed to get over the high old fairground fence and was in the field, where the slaughter-house was.
All the time I was trying to yell or scream, or be sensible and tell those two black men that I was a man and not a woman, but I couldn’t make it. And then I heard a sound like a board cracking or breaking in the fence and thought they were still after me.
So I kept on running like a crazy man, in the field, and just then I stumbled and fell over something. I’ve told you how the old slaughter-house field was filled with bones, that had been lying there a long time and had all been washed white. There were heads of sheep and cows and all kinds of things.
And when I fell and pitched forward I fell right into the midst of something, still and cold and white.
It was probably the skeleton of a horse lying there. In small towns like that, they take an old worn-out horse, that has died, and haul him off to some field outside of town and skin him for the hide, that they can sell for a dollar or two. It doesn’t make any difference what the horse has been, that’s the way he usually ends up. Maybe even Pick-it-boy, or O My Man, or a lot of other good fast ones I’ve seen and known have ended that way by this time.
And so I think it was the bones of a horse lying there and he must have been lying on his back. The birds and wild animals had picked all his flesh away and the rain had washed his bones clean.
Anyway I fell and pitched forward and my side got cut pretty deep and my hands clutched at something. I had fallen right in between the ribs of the horse and they seemed to wrap themselves around me close. And my hands, clutching upwards, had got hold of the cheeks of that dead horse and the bones of his cheeks were cold as ice with the rain washing over them. White bones wrapped around me and white bones in my hands.
There was a new terror now that seemed to go down to the very bottom of me, to the bottom of the inside of me, I mean. It shook me like I have seen a rat in a barn shaken by a dog. It was a terror like a big wave that hits you when you are walking on a seashore, maybe. You see it coming and you try to run and get away but when you start to run inshore there is a stone cliff you can’t climb. So the wave comes high as a mountain, and there it is, right in front of you and nothing in all this world can stop it. And now it had knocked you down and rolled and tumbled you over and over and washed you clean, clean, but dead maybe.
And that’s the way I felt—I seemed to myself dead with blind terror. It was a feeling like the finger of God running down your back and burning you clean, I mean.
It burned all that silly nonsense about being a girl right out of me.
I screamed at last and the spell that was on me was broken. I’ll bet the scream I let out of me could have been heard a mile and a half.
Right away I felt better and crawled out from among the pile of bones, and then I stood on my own feet again and I wasn’t a woman, or a young girl any more but a man and my own self, and as far as I know I’ve been that way ever since. Even the black night seemed warm and alive now, like a mother might be to a kid in the dark.
Only I couldn’t go back to the race track because I was blubbering and crying and was ashamed of myself and of what a fool I had made of myself. Someone might see me and I couldn’t stand that, not at that moment.
So I went across the field, walking now, not running like a crazy man, and pretty soon I came to a fence and crawled over and got into another field, in which there was a straw stack, I just happened to find in the pitch darkness.
The straw stack had been there a long time and some sheep had nibbled away at it until they had made a pretty deep hole, like a cave, in the side of it. I found the hole and crawled in and there were some sheep in there, about a dozen of them.
When I came in, creeping on my hands and knees, they didn’t make much fuss, just stirred around a little and then settled down.
So I settled down amongst them too. They were warm and gentle and kind, like Pick-it-boy, and being in there with them made me feel better than I would have felt being with any human person I knew at that time.
So I settled down and slept after a while, and when I woke up it was daylight and not very cold and the rain was over. The clouds were breaking away from the sky now and maybe there would be a fair the next week but if there was I knew I wouldn’t be there to see it.
Because what I expected to happen did happen. I had to go back across the fields and the fairground to the place where my clothes were, right in the broad daylight, and me stark naked, and of course I knew someone would be up and would raise a shout, and every swipe and every driver would stick his head out and would whoop with laughter.
And there would be a thousand questions asked, and I would be too mad and too ashamed to answer, and would perhaps begin to blubber, and that would make me more ashamed than ever.
It all turned out just as I expected, except that when the noise and the shouts of laughter were going it the loudest, Burt came out of the stall where O My Man was kept, and when he saw me he didn’t know what was the matter but he knew something was up that wasn’t on the square and for which I wasn’t to blame.
So he got so all-fired mad he couldn’t speak for a minute, and then he grabbed a pitchfork and began prancing up and down before the other stalls, giving that gang of swipes and drivers such a royal old dressing-down as you never heard. You should have heard him sling language. It was grand to hear.
And while he was doing it I sneaked up into the loft, blubbering because I was so pleased and happy to hear him swear that way, and I got my wet clothes on quick and got down, and gave Pick-it-boy a goodbye kiss on the cheek and lit out.
The last I saw of all that part of my life was Burt, still going it, and yelling out for the man who had put up a trick on me to come out and get what was coming to him. He had the pitch-fork in his hand and was swinging it around, and every now and then he would make a kind of lunge at a tree or something, he was so mad through, and there was no one else in sight at all. And Burt didn’t even see me cutting out along the fence through a gate and down the hill and out of the race-horse and the tramp life for the rest of my days.
Milk Bottles
* * *
I LIVED, during that summer, in a large room on the top floor of an old house on the North Side in Chicago. It was August and the night was hot. Until after midnight I sat—the sweat trickling down my back—under a lamp, laboring to feel my way into the lives of the fanciful people who were trying also to live in the tale on which I was at work.
It was a hopeless affair.
I became involved in the efforts of the shadowy people and they in turn became involved in the fact of the hot uncomfortable room, in the fact that, although it was what the farmers of the Middle West call “good corn-growing weather” it was plain hell to be alive in Chicago. Hand in hand the shadowy people
of my fanciful world and myself groped our way through a forest in which the leaves had all been burned off the trees. The hot ground burned the shoes off our feet. We were striving to make our way through the forest and into some cool beautiful city. The fact is, as you will clearly understand, I was a little off my head.
When I gave up the struggle and got to my feet the chairs in the room danced about. They also were running aimlessly through a burning land and striving to reach some mythical city. “I’d better get out of here and go for a walk or go jump into the lake and cool myself off,” I thought.
I went down out of my room and into the street. On a lower floor of the house lived two burlesque actresses who had just come in from their evening’s work and who now sat in their room talking. As I reached the street something heavy whirled past my head and broke on the stone pavement. A white liquid spurted over my clothes and the voice of one of the actresses could be heard coming from the one lighted room of the house. “Oh, hell! We live such damned lives, we do, and we work in such a town! A dog is better off! And now they are going to take booze away from us too! I come home from working in that hot theatre on a hot night like this and what do I see—a half-filled bottle of spoiled milk standing on a window sill!
“I won’t stand it! I got to smash everything!” she cried.
I walked eastward from my house. From the northwestern end of the city great hordes of men women and children had come to spend the night out of doors, by the shore of the lake. It was stifling hot there too and the air was heavy with a sense of struggle. On a few hundred acres of flat land, that had formerly been a swamp, some two million people were fighting for the peace and quiet of sleep and not getting it. Out of the half darkness, beyond the little strip of park land at the water’s edge, the huge empty houses of Chicago’s fashionable folk made a greyish-blue blot against the sky. “Thank the gods,” I thought, “there are some people who can get out of here, who can go to the mountains or the seashore or to Europe.” I stumbled in the half darkness over the legs of a woman who was lying and trying to sleep on the grass. A baby lay beside her and when she sat up it began to cry. I muttered an apology and stepped aside and as I did so my foot struck a half-filled milk bottle and I knocked it over, the milk running out on the grass. “Oh, I’m sorry. Please forgive me,” I cried. “Never mind,” the woman answered, “the milk is sour.”
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 56