“I was after a man and I got one, too. I got you,” she said. She had gone to the dance with a young man of the same suburb in which Bob’s cousins lived. Her father was a doctor. Helen took the tale right out of Will’s hands. She explained that when Will and Bob and the two girls, Grace and Cynthia, came into the dance hall she spotted Will at once. “That one’s mine,” she said to herself and almost before they had got inside the door she had been introduced to Will. They danced together at once.
There must really have been some tough people in the roadhouse that night. When Will and Helen were dancing together there was a big, low-browed, tough-looking fellow who kept trying to “make” Helen, Will said. He had started to tell me about it and then got an idea. “Say, you look here, Helen,” he said, turning to look at his wife, “didn’t you have something to do with that? Had you given that low-browed man the eye? Were you egging him on?”
“Sure,” she said.
She explained that when a woman, like herself, was at work, when she really was laying herself out to get a man, the right thing to do was to have a rival in the field. “You have to work with what material you have at hand, don’t you? You are an artist. You are always talking about art. You ought to understand that.”
There came very near being a row. Will had taken Helen to a table where Bob sat with Grace and Cynthia. The young tough swaggered up—he was a little high—and demanded a dance with Helen.
Helen got indignant. She looked frightened and Will felt it was up to him, and he isn’t the kind that is good at that sort of thing. Will is the kind that in such an emergency grows rather helpless.
Such a man begins to tremble. His back hurts. He dreams of being cool and determined, but is so helpless that very likely he shouts, makes the situation much worse, goes too far. What happened was that Helen settled the matter. She had already become a little tender about Will.
“What did you do?” I asked. “I understood you had become indignant.”
“I had,” she said, “but I managed. I got up and danced with him. I liked it. He was a good dancer.”
Helen, like Grace and Cynthia, had got her father’s car for the evening. When they left that tough place the young man who had come with her was on the back seat of the other car with Cynthia, and Will was in the car with her. That did not much please Cynthia, but it seemed Cynthia had very little to do with it.
So they had got started in that way. Afterward, Will continued going to Philadelphia with Bob for the week-ends, but things were different at the cousin’s house. “It was not so warm and cheerful there,” Will said. Helen was always dropping in. Soon the two young men began stopping at a hotel in Philadelphia. Bob had also got interested in Helen. They stopped at a cheap hotel, not having much money, and Helen came to see them. Will said she came right up into the hotel bedroom. As he began thinking of what went on during that time, Will looked at Helen with a kind of wonder in his eyes. “I guess you could have had either of us,” he said, with a note of awe in his voice. It was obvious he admired his wife.
“I was not so sure about Bob,” Helen said.
She wrote letters to both of the men during the week, when they were in New York at work, and when they arrived in Philadelphia, there she was. She always managed to get her father’s car. She went home to her suburb late on Saturday nights and came back again early on Sundays. Saturday nights they all went together to a dance.
One day her father grew alarmed and angry, and followed her. He saw her go to the two men, right into their room, in the cheap hotel.
She had to decide the matter. She had made up her mind to marry one of the men, was tired of living at home. Things, I gathered, were getting rather warm at home. She was an only child. She said her mother was crying all the time and her father was furious. “I had to be hard-boiled with them for the time,” she explained. She was rather like a surgeon about to perform an operation on a frightened patient. She cajoled and bullied them. When her father tried to put his foot down she issued an ultimatum. “I’m twenty-one,” she said. “If you interfere with me I shall leave home.”
“But how will you live?”
“Don’t be silly, Father, a woman can always live.”
She went right out to the garage, got her father’s car and drove to Philadelphia. In the room in the hotel she was studying the two men. She got Will to go down to the car with her. “Get in,” she said. They drove away from the hotel. “I didn’t know where we were going,” Will said.
They drove and drove. Will spoke of her mood that night. He was in love. When I heard this tale he was still very much in love. “It was a soft clear night with stars.” Speaking of it, he took hold of his wife’s hands.
“Let’s get married,” she said to Will that night. “But when?” he asked. She thought they had better do it at once. “But think of my salary,” Will said. “I am thinking about it. It isn’t much, is it?” The meagerness of his salary didn’t seem to alter her determination. “I can’t wait any longer,” was what she said. She said they would drive around all night and get married early the next morning.
And so they did. Her people, the doctor and his wife, were in a panic.
Will and his wife went to them the next day. “How were you received?” I asked. “Fine,” Will said. He said that the doctor and his wife would have been happy no matter whom she had married. “You see, I had arranged for that,” Helen said. “I had got them into a state where marriage sure seemed like salvation to them.”
Brother Death
* * *
THERE were the two oak stumps, knee high to a not-too-tall man and cut quite squarely across. They became to the two children objects of wonder. They had seen the two trees cut but had run away just as the trees fell. They hadn’t thought of the two stumps, to be left standing there; hadn’t even looked at them. Afterwards Ted said to his sister Mary, speaking of the stumps: “I wonder if they bled, like legs, when a surgeon cuts a man’s leg off.” He had been hearing war stories. A man came to the farm one day to visit one of the farm-hands, a man who had been in the World War and had lost an arm. He stood in one of the barns talking. When Ted said that Mary spoke up at once. She hadn’t been lucky enough to be at the barn when the one-armed man was there talking, and was jealous. “Why not a woman or a girl’s leg?” she said, but Ted said the idea was silly. “Women and girls don’t get their legs and arms cut off,” he declared. “Why not? I’d just like to know why not?” Mary kept saying.
It would have been something if they had stayed, that day the trees were cut. “We might have gone and touched the places,” Ted said. He meant the stumps. Would they have been warm? Would they have bled? They did go and touch the places afterwards, but it was a cold day and the stumps were cold. Ted stuck to his point that only men’s arms and legs were cut off, but Mary thought of automobile accidents. “You can’t think just about wars. There might be an automobile accident,” she declared, but Ted wouldn’t be convinced.
They were both children, but something had made them both in an odd way old. Mary was fourteen and Ted eleven, but Ted wasn’t strong and that rather evened things up. They were the children of a well-to-do Virginia farmer named John Grey in the Blue Ridge country in Southwestern Virginia. There was a wide valley called the “Rich Valley,” with a railroad and a small river running through it and high mountains in sight, to the north and south. Ted had some kind of heart disease, a lesion, something of the sort, the result of a severe attack of diphtheria when he was a child of eight. He was thin and not strong but curiously alive. The doctor said he might die at any moment, might just drop down dead. The fact had drawn him peculiarly close to his sister Mary. It had awakened a strong and determined maternalism in her.
The whole family, the neighbors, on neighboring farms in the valley, and even the other children at the schoolhouse where they went to school recognized something as existing between the two children. “Look at them going along there,” people said. “They do seem to have good times to
gether, but they are so serious. For such young children they are too serious. Still, I suppose, under the circumstances, it’s natural.” Of course, everyone knew about Ted. It had done something to Mary. At fourteen she was both a child and a grown woman. The woman side of her kept popping out at unexpected moments.
She had sensed something concerning her brother Ted. It was because he was as he was, having that kind of a heart, a heart likely at any moment to stop beating, leaving him dead, cut down like a young tree. The others in the Grey family, that is to say, the older ones, the mother and father and an older brother, Don, who was eighteen now, recognized something as belonging to the two children, being, as it were, between them, but the recognition wasn’t very definite. People in your own family are likely at any moment to do strange, sometimes hurtful things to you. You have to watch them. Ted and Mary had both found that out.
The brother Don was like the father, already at eighteen almost a grown man. He was that sort, the kind people speak of, saying: “He’s a good man. He’ll make a good solid dependable man.” The father, when he was a young man, never drank, never went chasing the girls, was never wild. There had been enough wild young ones in the Rich Valley when he was a lad. Some of them had inherited big farms and had lost them, gambling, drinking, fooling with fast horses and chasing after the women. It had been almost a Virginia tradition, but John Grey was a land man. All the Greys were. There were other large cattle farms owned by Greys up and down the valley.
John Grey, every one said, was a natural cattle man. He knew beef cattle, of the big so-called export type, how to pick and feed them to make beef. He knew how and where to get the right kind of young stock to turn into his fields. It was blue-grass country. Big beef cattle went directly off the pastures to market. The Grey farm contained over twelve hundred acres, most of it in blue grass.
The father was a land man, land hungry. He had begun, as a cattle farmer, with a small place, inherited from his father, some two hundred acres, lying next to what was then the big Aspinwahl place and, after he began, he never stopped getting more land. He kept cutting in on the Aspinwahls who were a rather horsey, fast lot. They thought of themselves as Virginia aristocrats, having, as they weren’t so modest about pointing out, a family going back and back, family tradition, guests always being entertained, fast horses kept, money being bet on fast horses. John Grey getting their land, now twenty acres, then thirty, then fifty, until at last he got the old Aspinwahl house, with one of the Aspinwahl girls, not a young one, not one of the best-looking ones, as wife. The Aspinwahl place was down, by that time, to less than a hundred acres, but he went on, year after year, always being careful and shrewd, making every penny count, never wasting a cent, adding and adding to what was now the Grey place. The former Aspinwahl house was a large old brick house with fireplaces in all the rooms and was very comfortable.
People wondered why Louise Aspinwahl had married John Grey, but when they were wondering they smiled. The Aspinwahl girls were all well educated, had all been away to college, but Louise wasn’t so pretty. She got nicer after marriage, suddenly almost beautiful. The Aspinwahls were, as every one knew, naturally sensitive, really first class but the men couldn’t hang onto land and the Greys could. In all that section of Virginia, people gave John Grey credit for being what he was. They respected him. “He’s on the level,” they said, “as honest as a horse. He has cattle sense, that’s it.” He could run his big hand down over the flank of a steer and say, almost to the pound, what he would weigh on the scales or he could look at a calf or a yearling and say, “He’ll do,” and he would do. A steer is a steer. He isn’t supposed to do anything but make beef.
There was Don, the oldest son of the Grey family. He was so evidently destined to be a Grey, to be another like his father. He had long been a star in the 4H Club of the Virginia county and, even as a lad of nine and ten, had won prizes at steer judging. At twelve he had produced, no one helping him, doing all the work himself, more bushels of corn on an acre of land than any other boy in the State.
It was all a little amazing, even a bit queer to Mary Grey, being as she was a girl peculiarly conscious, so old and young, so aware. There was Don, the older brother, big and strong of body, like the father, and there was the young brother Ted. Ordinarily, in the ordinary course of life, she being what she was—female—it would have been quite natural and right for her to have given her young girl’s admiration to Don but she didn’t. For some reason, Don barely existed for her. He was outside, not in it, while for her Ted, the seemingly weak one of the family, was everything.
Still there Don was, so big of body, so quiet, so apparently sure of himself. The father had begun, as a young cattle man, with the two hundred acres, and now he had the twelve hundred. What would Don Grey do when he started? Already he knew, although he didn’t say anything, that he wanted to start. He wanted to run things, be his own boss. His father had offered to send him away to college, to an agricultural college, but he wouldn’t go. “No. I can learn more here,” he said.
Already there was a contest, always kept under the surface, between the father and son. It concerned ways of doing things, decisions to be made. As yet the son always surrendered.
It is like that in a family, little isolated groups formed within the larger group, jealousies, concealed hatreds, silent battles secretly going on—among the Greys, Mary and Ted, Don and his father, the mother and the two younger children, Gladys, a girl child of six now, who adored her brother Don, and Harry, a boy child of two.
As for Mary and Ted, they lived within their own world, but their own world had not been established without a struggle. The point was that Ted, having the heart that might at any moment stop beating, was always being treated tenderly by the others. Only Mary understood that—how it infuriated and hurt him.
“No, Ted, I wouldn’t do that.
“Now, Ted, do be careful.”
Sometimes Ted went white and trembling with anger, Don, the father, the mother, all keeping at him like that. It didn’t matter what he wanted to do, learn to drive one of the two family cars, climb a tree to find a bird’s nest, run a race with Mary. Naturally, being on a farm, he wanted to try his hand at breaking a colt, beginning with him, getting a saddle on, having it out with him. “No, Ted. You can’t.” He had learned to swear, picking it up from the farm-hands and from boys at the country school. “Hell! Goddam!” he said to Mary. Only Mary understood how he felt, and she had not put the matter very definitely into words, not even to herself. It was one of the things that made her old when she was so young. It made her stand aside from the others of the family, aroused in her a curious determination. “They shall not.” She caught herself saying the words to herself. “They shall not.
“If he is to have but a few years of life, they shall not spoil what he is to have. Why should they make him die, over and over, day after day?” The thoughts in her did not become so definite. She had resentment against the others. She was like a soldier, standing guard over Ted.
The two children drew more and more away, into their own world and only once did what Mary felt come to the surface. That was with the mother.
It was on an early Summer day and Ted and Mary were playing in the rain. They were on a side porch of the house, where the water came pouring down from the eaves. At a corner of the porch there was a great stream, and first Ted and then Mary dashed through it, returning to the porch with clothes soaked and water running in streams from soaked hair. There was something joyous, the feel of the cold water on the body, under clothes, and they were shrieking with laughter when the mother came to the door. She looked at Ted. There was fear and anxiety in her voice. “Oh, Ted, you know you mustn’t, you mustn’t.” Just that. All the rest implied. Nothing said to Mary. There it was. “Oh, Ted, you mustn’t. You mustn’t run hard, climb trees, ride horses. The least shock to you may do it.” It was the old story again, and, of course, Ted understood. He went white and trembled. Why couldn’t the rest understand that wa
s a hundred times worse for him? On that day, without answering his mother, he ran off the porch and through the rain toward the barns. He wanted to go hide himself from every one. Mary knew how he felt.
She got suddenly very old and very angry. The mother and daughter stood looking at each other, the woman nearing fifty and the child of fourteen. It was getting everything in the family reversed. Mary felt that but felt she had to do something. “You should have more sense, Mother,” she said seriously. She also had gone white. Her lips trembled. “You mustn’t do it any more. Don’t you ever do it again.”
“What, child?” There was astonishment and half anger in the mother’s voice. “Always making him think of it,” Mary said. She wanted to cry but didn’t.
The mother understood. There was a queer tense moment before Mary also walked off, toward the barns, in the rain. It wasn’t all so clear. The mother wanted to fly at the child, perhaps shake her for daring to be so impudent. A child like that to decide things—to dare to reprove her mother. There was so much implied—even that Ted be allowed to die, quickly, suddenly, rather than that death, danger of sudden death, be brought again and again to his attention. There were values in life, implied by a child’s words: “Life, what is it worth? Is death the most terrible thing?” The mother turned and went silently into the house while Mary, going to the barns, presently found Ted. He was in an empty horse stall, standing with his back to the wall, staring. There were no explanations. “Well,” Ted said presently, and, “Come on, Ted,” Mary replied. It was necessary to do something, even perhaps more risky than playing in the rain. The rain was already passing. “Let’s take off our shoes,” Mary said. Going barefoot was one of the things forbidden Ted. They took their shoes off and, leaving them in the barn, went into an orchard. There was a small creek below the orchard, a creek that went down to the river and now it would be in flood. They went into it and once Mary got swept off her feet so that Ted had to pull her out. She spoke then. “I told Mother,” she said, looking serious.
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 80