“Well, the devil! A man should grow up after a time, perhaps. When a man’s wife had died but such a short time before, it was just as well to walk through Main Street with more dignity—for the time being, anyway.”
Tom Appleton had a way of winking at men he passed in the street, as though to say, “Well, now I’ve got my kids with me, and we won’t say anything, but didn’t you and I have the very hell of a time last Wednesday night, eh? Mum’s the word, old pal. Keep everything quiet. There are gay times ahead for you and me. We’ll cut loose, you bet, when you and me are out together next time.”
Will grew a little angry about something he couldn’t exactly understand. His father stopped in front of Jake Mann’s meat market. “You kids go along home. Tell Kate I am bringing a steak. I’ll be right on your heels,” he said.
He would get the steak and then he would go into Alf Geiger’s saloon and get a good, stiff drink of whisky. There would be no one now to bother about smelling it on his breath when he got home later. Not that his wife had ever said anything when he wanted a drink—but you know how a man feels when there’s a woman in the house. “Why, hello, Bildad Smith—how’s the old game leg? Come on, have a little nip with me. Were you on Main Street last band meeting night and did you hear us do that new gallop? It’s a humdinger. Turkey White did that trombone solo simply grand.”
Will and Fred had got beyond Main Street now, and Will took a small pipe with a curved stem out of his overcoat pocket and lighted it. “I’ll bet I could hang a ceiling without father there at all, if only some one would give me a chance,” he said. Now that his father was no longer present to embarrass him with his lack of dignity, he felt comfortable and happy. Also, it was something to be able to smoke a pipe without discomfiture. When mother was alive she was always kissing a fellow when he came home at night, and then one had to be mighty careful about smoking. Now it was different. One had become a man and one accepted manhood with its responsibilities. “Don’t it make you sick at all?” Fred asked. “Huh, naw!” Will answered contemptuously.
The new disaster to the family came late in August, just when the fall work was all ahead, and the prospects good too. A. P. Wrigley, the jeweler, had just built a big, new house and barn on a farm he had bought the year before. It was a mile out of town on the Turner pike.
That would be a job to set the Appletons up for the winter. The house was to have three coats outside, with all the work inside, and the barn was to have two coats—and the two boys were to work with their father and were to have regular wages.
And just to think of the work to be done inside that house made Tom Appleton’s mouth water. He talked of it all the time, and in the evenings liked to sit in a chair in the Appleton’s front yard, get some neighbor over, and then go on about it. How he slung house-painter’s lingo about! The doors and cupboards were to be grained in imitation of weathered oak, the front door was to be curly maple, and there was to be black walnut, too. Well, there wasn’t another painter in the town could imitate all the various kinds of wood as Tom could. Just show him the wood, or tell him—you didn’t have to show him anything. Name what you wanted—that was enough. To be sure a man had to have the right tools, but give him the tools and then just go off and leave everything to him. What the devil! When A. P. Wrigley gave him this new house to do, he showed he was a man who knew what he was doing.
As for the practical side of the matter, everyone in the family knew that the Wrigley job meant a safe winter. There wasn’t any speculation, as when taking work on the contract plan. All work was to be paid for by the day, and the boys were to have their wages, too. It meant new suits for the boys, a new dress and maybe a hat for Kate, the house rent paid all winter, potatoes in the cellar. It meant safety—that was the truth.
In the evenings, sometimes, Tom got out his tools and looked at them. Brushes and graining tools were spread out on the kitchen table, and Kate and the boys gathered about. It was Fred’s job to see that all brushes were kept clean and, one by one, Tom ran his fingers over them, and then worked them back and forth over the palm of his hand. “This is a camel’s hair,” he said, picking a soft fine-haired brush up and handing it to Will. “I paid four dollars and eighty cents for that.” Will also worked it back and forth over the palm of his hand, just as his father had done and then Kate picked it up and did the same thing. “It’s as soft as the cat’s back,” she said. Will thought that rather silly. He looked forward to the day when he would have brushes ladders and pots of his own, and could show them off before people and through his mind went words he had picked up from his father’s talk. One spoke of the “heel” and “toe” of a brush. The way to put on varnish was to “flow” it on. Will knew all the words of his trade now and didn’t have to talk like one of the kind of muts who just does, now and then, a jack job of house painting.
On the fatal evening a surprise party was held for Mr. and Mrs. Bardshare, who lived just across the road from the Appletons on Piety Hill. That was a chance for Tom Appleton. In any such affair he liked to have a hand in the arrangements. “Come on now, we’ll make her go with a bang. They’ll be setting in the house after supper, and Bill Bardshare will be in his stocking feet, and Ma Bardshare washing the dishes. They won’t be expecting nothing, and we’ll slip up, all dressed in our Sunday clothes, and let out a whoop. I’ll bring my cornet and let out a blast on that too. ‘What in Sam Hill is that?’ Say, I can just see Bill Bardshare jumping up and beginning to swear, thinking we’re a gang of kids come to bother him, like Hallowe’en, or something like that. You just get the grub, and I’ll make the coffee over to my house and bring it over hot. I’ll get ahold of two big pots and make a whooping lot of it.”
In the Appleton house all was in a flurry. Tom, Will and Fred were painting a barn, three miles out of town, but they knocked off work at four and Tom got the farmer’s son to drive them to town. He himself had to wash up, take a bath in a tub in the woodshed, shave and everything—just like Sunday. He looked more like a boy than a man when he got all dogged up.
And then the family had to have supper, over and done with, a little after six, and Tom didn’t dare go outside the house until dark. It wouldn’t do to have the Bardshares see him so fixed up. It was their wedding anniversary, and they might suspect something. He kept trotting about the house, and occasionally looked out of the front window toward the Bardshare house. “You kid, you,” Kate said, laughing. Sometimes she talked up to him like that, and after she said it he went upstairs, and getting out his cornet blew on it, so softly, you could hardly hear him downstairs. When he did that you couldn’t tell how badly he played, as when the band was going it on Main Street and he had to carry a passage right through alone. He sat in the room upstairs thinking. When Kate laughed at him it was like having his wife back, alive. There was the same shy sarcastic gleam in her eyes.
Well, it was the first time he had been out anywhere since his wife had died, and there might be some people think it would be better if he stayed at home now—look better, that is. When he had shaved he had cut his chin, and the blood had come. After a time he went downstairs and stood before the looking glass, hung above the kitchen sink, and dabbed at the spot with the wet end of a towel.
Will and Fred stood about.
Will’s mind was working—perhaps Kate’s, too. “Was there—could it be?—well, at such a party—only older people invited—there were always two or three widow women thrown in for good measure, as it were.”
Kate didn’t want any woman fooling around her kitchen. She was twenty years old.
“And it was just as well not to have any monkeyshine talk about motherless children,” such as Tom might indulge in. Even Fred thought that. There was a little wave of resentment against Tom in the house. It was a wave that didn’t make much noise, just crept, as it were softly, up a low sandy beach.
“Widow women went to such places, and then of course, people were always going home in couples.” Both Kate and Will had the same picture in mi
nd. It was late at night and in fancy they were both peeking out at front upper windows of the Appleton house. There were all the people coming out at the front door of the Bardshare house, and Bill Bardshare was standing there and holding the door open. He had managed to sneak away during the evening, and got his Sunday clothes on all right.
And the couples were coming out. “There was that woman now, that widow, Mrs. Childers.” She had been married twice, both husbands dead now, and she lived away over Maumee Pike way. “What makes a woman of her age want to act silly like that? It is the very devil how a woman can keep looking young and handsome after she has buried two men. There are some who say that, even when her last husband was alive—”
“But whether that’s true or not, what makes her want to act and talk silly that way?” Now her face is turned to the light and she is saying to old Bill Bardshare, “Sleep light, sleep tight, sweet dreams to you tonight.”
“It’s only what one may expect when one’s father lacks a sense of dignity. There is that old fool Tom now, hopping out of the Bardshare house like a kid, and running right up to Mrs. Childers. ‘May I see you home?’ he is saying, while all the others are laughing and smiling knowingly. It makes one’s blood run cold to see such a thing.”
* * *
“Well, fill up the pots. Let’s get the old coffee pots started, Kate. The gang’ll be creeping along up the street pretty soon now,” Tom shouted self-consciously, skipping busily about and breaking the little circle of thoughts in the house.
What happened was that—just as darkness came and when all the people were in the front yard before the Appleton house—Tom went and got it into his head to try to carry his cornet and two big coffee pots at the same time. Why didn’t he leave the coffee until later? There the people were in the dusk outside the house, and there was that kind of low whispering and tittering that always goes on at such a time—and then Tom stuck his head out at the door and shouted, “Let her go!”
And then he must have gone quite crazy, for he ran back into the kitchen and grabbed both of the big coffee pots, hanging on to his cornet at the same time. Of course he stumbled in the darkness in the road outside and fell, and of course all of that boiling hot coffee had to spill right over him.
It was terrible. The flood of boiling hot coffee made steam under his thick clothes, and there he lay screaming with the pain of it. What a confusion! He just writhed and screamed, and the people ran ’round and ’round in the half darkness like crazy things. Was it some kind of joke the crazy fellow was up to at the last minute! Tom always was such a devil to think up things. “You should see him down at Alf Geigers, sometimes on Saturday nights, imitating the way Joe Douglas got out on a limb, and then sawed it off between himself and the tree, and the look on Joe’s face when the limb began to crack. It would make you laugh until you screamed to see him imitate that.”
“But what now? My God!” There was Kate Appleton trying to tear her father’s clothes off, and crying and whimpering, and young Will Appleton knocking people aside. “Say, the man’s hurt! What’s happened? My God! Run for the doctor, someone. He’s burnt, something awful!”
* * *
Early in October Will Appleton sat in the smoking car of a day train that runs between Cleveland and Buffalo. His destination was Erie, Pennsylvania, and he had got on the passenger train at Ashtabula, Ohio. Just why his destination was Erie he couldn’t very easily have explained. He was going there anyway, going to get a job in a factory or on the docks there. Perhaps it was just a quirk of the mind that had made him decide upon Erie. It wasn’t as big as Cleveland or Buffalo or Toledo or Chicago, or any one of a lot of other cities to which he might have gone, looking for work.
At Ashtabula he came into the car and slid into a seat beside a little old man. His own clothes were wet and wrinkled, and his hair, eyebrows and ears were black with coal dust.
At the moment, there was in him a kind of bitter dislike of his native town, Bidwell. “Sakes alive, a man couldn’t get any work there—not in the winter.” After the accident to his father, and the spoiling of all the family plans, he had managed to find employment during September on the farms. He worked for a time with a threshing crew, and then got work cutting corn. It was all right. “A man made a dollar a day and board, and as he wore overalls all the time, he didn’t wear out no clothes. Still and all, the time when a fellow could make any money in Bidwell was past now, and the burns on his father’s body had gone pretty deep, and he might be laid up for months.”
Will had just made up his mind one day, after he had tramped about all morning from farm to farm without finding work, and then he had gone home and told Kate. “Dang it all,” he hadn’t intended lighting out right away—had thought he would stay about for a week or two, maybe. Well, he would go up town in the evening, dressed up in his best clothes, and stand around. “Hello, Harry, what you going to do this winter? I thought I would run over to Erie, Pennsylvania. I got an offer in a factory over there. Well, so long—if I don’t see you again.”
Kate hadn’t seemed to understand, had seemed in an almighty hurry about getting him off. It was a shame she couldn’t have a little more heart. Still, Kate was all right—worried a good deal no doubt. After their talk she had just said, “Yes, I think that’s best, you had better go,” and had gone to change the bandages on Tom’s legs and back. The father was sitting among pillows in a rocking chair in the front room.
Will went up stairs and put his things, overalls and a few shirts, into a bundle. Then he went down stairs and took a walk—went out along a road that led into the country, and stopped on a bridge. It was near a place where he and other kids used to come swimming on summer afternoons. A thought had come into his head. There was a young fellow worked in Pawsey’s jewelry store came to see Kate sometimes on Sunday evenings and they went off to walk together. “Did Kate want to get married?” If she did his going away now might be for good. He hadn’t thought about that before. On that afternoon, and quite suddenly, all the world outside of Bidwell seemed huge and terrible to him and a few secret tears came into his eyes, but he managed to choke them back. For just a moment his mouth opened and closed queerly, like the mouth of a fish, when you take it out of the water and hold it in your hand.
When he returned to the house at supper time things were better. He had left his bundle on a chair in the kitchen and Kate had wrapped it more carefully, and had put in a number of things he had forgotten. His father called him into the front room. “It’s all right, Will. Every young fellow ought to take a whirl out in the world. I did it myself, at about your age,” Tom had said, a little pompously.
Then supper was served, and there was apple pie. That was a luxury the Appletons had perhaps better not have indulged in at that time, but Will knew Kate had baked it during the afternoon,—it might be as a way of showing him how she felt. Eating two large slices had rather set him up.
And then, before he realized how the time was slipping away, ten o’clock had come, and it was time for him to go. He was going to beat his way out of town on a freight train, and there was a local going toward Cleveland at ten o’clock. Fred had gone off to bed, and his father was asleep in the rocking chair in the front room. He had picked up his bundle, and Kate had put on her hat. “I’m going to see you off,” she had said.
Will and Kate had walked in silence along the streets to where he was to wait, in the shadow of Whaley’s Warehouse, until the freight came along. Later when he thought back over that evening he was glad, that although she was three years older, he was taller than Kate.
How vividly everything that happened later stayed in his mind. After the train came, and he had crawled into an empty coal car, he sat hunched up in a corner. Overhead he could see the sky, and when the train stopped at towns there was always the chance the car in which he was concealed would be shoved into a siding, and left. The brakemen walked along the tracks beside the car shouting to each other and their lanterns made little splashes of light in the dark
ness.
“How black the sky!” After a time it began to rain. “His suit would be in a pretty mess. After all a fellow couldn’t come right out and ask his sister if she intended to marry. If Kate married, then his father would also marry again. It was all right for a young woman like Kate, but for a man of forty to think of marriage—the devil! Why didn’t Tom Appleton have more dignity? After all, Fred was only a kid and a new woman coming in, to be his mother—that might be all right for a kid.”
All during that night on the freight train Will had thought a good deal about marriage—rather vague thoughts—coming and going like birds flying in and out of a bush. It was all a matter—this business of man and woman—that did not touch him very closely—not yet. The matter of having a home—that was something else. A home was something at a fellow’s back. When one went off to work all week at some farm, and at night maybe went into a strange room to sleep, there was always the Appleton house—floating as it were, like a picture at the back of the mind—the Appleton house, and Kate moving about. She had been up town, and now had come home and was going up the stairs. Tom Appleton was fussing about in the kitchen. He liked a bite before he went off to bed for the night but presently he would go up stairs and into his own room. He liked to smoke his pipe before he slept and sometimes he got out his cornet and blew two or three soft sad notes.
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 58