Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  A woman in an automobile with her eyes on Bruce.

  A workman, like Sponge, saw, felt, tasted things through his fingers. There was a disease of life due to men getting away from their own hands, their own bodies too. Things felt with the whole body — rivers — trees — skies — grasses growing — grain growing — ships — seed stirring in the ground — city streets — dust in city streets — steel — iron — sky-scrapers — faces in city streets — bodies of men — bodies of women — children’s quick slender bodies.

  That young Jew in the Chicago newspaper office slinging words brilliantly — slinging the bunk. Bernice writing that story about the poet and the woman of wax, Tom Wills swearing at the young Jew. “He’s afraid of his woman.”

  Bruce cutting out from Chicago — spending weeks on a river — on the docks in New Orleans.

  Thoughts of his mother — thoughts of a boy’s thoughts of his mother. A man like Bruce could think a hundred diverse thoughts walking ten steps beside a workman named Sponge Martin.

  Had Sponge noticed the little passage between himself — Bruce — and that woman in the car? He had felt it — perhaps through his fingers.

  “That woman’s taken a shine to you. Better look out,” Sponge said.

  Bruce smiled.

  More thoughts of his mother as he walked with Sponge. Sponge talking. He did not press the theme of the woman in the car. It might just have been a workman’s slant. Workmen were like that, they thought of women only in one way. There was a kind of terrible matter-of-factness about workmen. More than likely most of their observations were lies. De diddle de dum dum! De diddle de dum dum!

  Bruce remembered, or thought he remembered, certain things about his mother, and after he came back to Old Harbor they piled up in his consciousness. The nights in the hotel. After the evening meal and when the nights were fair he, with his father and mother, sat about with the strangers, travelers and others, before the door of the hotel and then Bruce was put to bed. Sometimes the principal of the school got into a discussion with some man. “Is a protective tariff a good thing? Don’t you think it will raise prices too much? The fellow between will get crushed between the upper and the nether millstone.”

  What was a nether millstone?

  The father and mother went to sit in their rooms, the man reading school papers and the woman a book. Sometimes she worked at her sewing. Then the woman came into the boy’s room and kissed him on both cheeks. “Now you go to sleep,” she said. Sometimes after he was in bed the parents went out for a walk. Where did they go? Did they go to sit on the bench by the tree in front of the store on the street facing the river?

  The river going on always — a huge thing. It never seemed to hurry. After a while it joined another river, called the Mississippi, and went away south. More and more water flowing. When he was lying in bed the river seemed to flow through the boy’s head. On spring nights, sometimes, when the man and woman were out, there came a sudden flaw of rain and he got out of his bed and went to the open window. The sky was dark and mysterious, but when one looked down from his second-story room there was the cheerful sight of people going hurriedly along a street, going downhill along a street toward the river, dodging in and out of doorways to avoid the rain.

  On other nights in bed there was just the dark space where the window and the sky were. Men passed along a hallway outside his door — traveling men going to bed — heavy-footed fat men, most of them.

  The man Bruce had somehow got his notion of his mother mixed up with his feeling about the river. He was quite conscious that it was all rather a muddle in his head. Mother Mississippi, Mother Ohio, eh? That was all tommyrot, of course. “Poetic bunk,” Tom Wills would have called it. It was symbolism, getting off your base, saying one thing and meaning another. Still there might be something in it — something Mark Twain had almost got and didn’t dare try to quite get — the beginning of a kind of big continental poetry, eh? Warm, big rich rivers flowing down — Mother Ohio, Mother Mississippi. When you begin to get smart you got to look out for that kind of bunk. Go easy, brother, if you say it out loud some foxy city man may laugh at you. Tom Wills growling, “Ah, cut it out!” When you were a boy and sat looking at the river something appeared, a dark spot away off up river. You watched it coming slowly down but it was so far out that you could not see what it was. Water-soaked logs sometimes bobbed along, just one end sticking up like a man swimming. It might be a swimmer away out there but of course it couldn’t be. Men do not swim down the Ohio, miles and miles, down the Mississippi, miles and miles. When Bruce was a child and sat on the bench watching, he half closed his eyes, and his mother sitting beside him did the same thing. The thing to figure out later, when he was a grown man, was whether or not he and his mother had, at the same time, the same thoughts. Perhaps the thoughts Bruce later fancied he had, as a child, hadn’t come at all. The fancy was a tricky thing. What one was trying to do with the fancy was to link oneself, in some rather mysterious way, with others.

  You watched the log bob along. Now it was opposite you, away over near the Kentucky shore where the slow strong current was.

  And now it would begin to get smaller and smaller. How long could you keep it in sight, on the gray face of the waters, a little black thing getting smaller and smaller? It became a test. The need was terrible. What need? To keep the eyes glued on a drifting, floating black spot on a moving surface of yellow-gray, to hold the eyes there fixed, as long as possible.

  What did a man or woman sitting on a bench on a street on a dusky evening and looking at the darkening face of a river, what did they see? Why had they need to do the rather absurd thing together? When the child’s father and mother were out alone together at night was there something of the same kind of need in them? Did they meet the need in such a childish way? When they came home and had got into bed sometimes they talked in low tones and sometimes they were silent

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  OTHER STRANGE MEMORIES for Bruce, walking with Sponge. When he went with his father and mother from Old Harbor to Indianapolis they went by boat to Louisville. Then Bruce was twelve. His memories of that occasion might be more trustworthy. They got up in the early morning and went in a hack to the boat-landing. There were two other passengers, two young men who were evidently not citizens of Old Harbor. Who were they? Certain figures, seen under certain circumstances, remain sharply in the memory always. A tricky business though, taking such things too seriously. It might lead to mysticism and an American mystic would be something ridiculous.

  That woman in the car by the factory door Bruce and Sponge had just passed. Odd that Sponge had known about there being a passage — of a sort — between her and Bruce. He hadn’t been looking.

  Odd, too, if Bruce’s mother had been one who was always making such contacts, making them and her man — Bruce’s father — not knowing.

  She, herself, might not have known — not consciously.

  That day of his boyhood on the river had undoubtedly been very vivid to Bruce.

  To be sure, Bruce was a child then, and to a child the adventure of going to live at a new place is something tremendous.

  What will be seen at the new place, what people will be there, what will life be like there?

  The two young men who had got on the boat that morning when he, with his father and mother, left Old Harbor, had stood by a railing on an upper deck talking while the boat got out into the stream. One was rather heavy, a broad-shouldered man with black hair and big hands. He smoked a pipe. The other was slender and had a small black mustache which he kept stroking.

  Bruce sat with his father and mother on a bench. The morning passed. Landings were made and goods were put off the boat. The two young men passengers kept walking about, laughing and talking earnestly, and the child had a feeling that one of them, the slender man, had some sort of connection with his mother. It was as though the man and the woman had once known each other and now were embarrassed finding themselves on the same boat. Wh
en they passed the bench where the Stocktons sat the slender man did not look at them but out over the river. Bruce had a shy boyish desire to call to him. He became absorbed in the young man and in his mother. How young she looked that day — like a girl.

  Bruce’s father got into a long talk with the captain of the boat who bragged of his experiences in the early days on the river. He talked of the black deck-hands, “We owned them then, like so many horses, but we had to take care of them like horses. It was after the war we began getting the most out of them. They were our property just the same, do you see, but we couldn’t sell them and we could always get all we wanted. Niggers love the river. You can’t keep a nigger off the river. We used to get ’em for five or six dollars a month and we didn’t pay ’em that if we didn’t want to. Why should we? If a nigger got gay we knocked him into the river. No one ever made any inquiry about a missing nigger, them days.”

  The boat-captain and the school-teacher went away to another part of the boat and Bruce sat alone with his mother. In his memory — after she died — she remained a slender, rather small woman with a sweet, serious face. Almost always she was quiet and reserved, but sometimes — rarely — as on that day on the boat she became strangely alive and eager. In the afternoon when the boy had grown tired running about the boat he went to sit with her again. Evening came. Within an hour they would be tied up at Louisville. The captain had taken Bruce’s father up into the pilot-house. Near Bruce and his mother stood the two young men. The boat came to a landing, the last landing it would make before reaching the city.

  There was a long sloping shore with cobblestones set in the mud of the river levee and the town at which they had stopped was much like the town of Old Harbor, only somewhat smaller. Many bags of grain were to be put off and the niggers were trotting up and down the landing-stage singing as they worked.

  From the throats of the ragged black men as they trotted up and down the landing-stage, strange haunting notes. Words were caught up, tossed about, held in the throat. Word-lovers, sound-lovers — the blacks seemed to hold a tone in some warm place, under their red tongues perhaps. Their thick lips were walls under which the tone hid. Unconscious love of inanimate things lost to the whites — skies, the river, a moving boat — black mysticism — never expressed except in song or in the movements of bodies. The bodies of the black workers belonged to each other as the sky belonged to the river. Far off now, down river, where the sky was splashed with red, it touched the face of the river. The tones from the throats of the black workers touched each other, caressed each other. On the deck of the boat a red-faced mate stood swearing as though at the sky and the river.

  The words coming from the throats of the black workers could not be understood by the boy but were strong and lovely. Afterwards when he thought of that moment Bruce always remembered the singing voices of the negro deck-hands as colors. Streaming reds, browns, golden yellows coming out of black throats. He grew strangely excited inside himself, and his mother, sitting beside him, was also excited. “Ah, my baby! Ah, my baby!” Sounds caught and held in black throats. Notes split into quarter-notes. The word, as meaning, of no importance. Perhaps words were always unimportant. There were strange words about a “banjo dog.” What was a “banjo dog?”

  “Ah, my banjo dog! Oh, oh! Oh, oh! Ah, my banjo dog!”

  Brown bodies trotting, black bodies trotting. The bodies of all the men running up and down the landing-stage were one body. One could not he distinguished from another. They were lost in each other.

  Could the bodies of people he so lost in each other? Bruce’s mother had taken the boy’s hand and held it closely, warmly. Near by stood the slender young man who had got on the boat in the morning. Did he know how the mother and the boy felt at that moment and did he want to be a part of them? There was no doubt that all day, as the boat labored up river, there had been something between the woman and the man, something of which they had both been but semi-conscious. The school-teacher had not known, but the boy and the slender young man’s companion had known. Long after that evening sometimes — thoughts coming into the head of a man who had once been a boy on a boat with his mother. All day as the man had gone about the boat he had talked to his companion but there had been a call in him toward the woman with the child. Something within him went toward the woman as the sun went toward the western horizon.

  Now the evening sun seemed to be about to drop into the river, far off to the west, and the sky was rosy red.

  The young man’s hand rested on the shoulder of his companion but his face was turned toward the woman and the child. The woman’s face was red, like the evening sky. She did not look at the young man, but away from him across the river and the boy looked from the young man’s face to his mother’s face. His mother’s hand gripped his hand tightly.

  Bruce never had any brothers or sisters. Could it be that his mother had wanted more children? Long afterwards, sometimes — that time after he left Bernice, when he was floating down the Mississippi River in an open boat, before he lost his boat one night in a storm when he had gone ashore — odd things happened. He pulled the boat ashore under a tree somewhere and lay down on the grass on the river-bank. An empty river filled with ghosts before his eyes. He was half asleep, half awake. Fancies flooded his mind. Before the storm came that blew his boat away he lay for a long time in the darkness near the water’s edge reliving another evening on a river. The strangeness and the wonder of things — in nature — he had known as a boy and that he had somehow later lost — the sense lost living in a city and being married to Bernice — could he get it back again? There was the strangeness and wonder of trees, skies, city streets, black men, white men — of buildings, words, sounds, thoughts, fancies. Perhaps white men’s getting on so fast in life, having newspapers, advertising, great cities, smart clever minds, ruling the world, had cost them more than they had gained. They hadn’t gained much.

  That young man Bruce had once seen on an Ohio river-boat when he was a boy taking the trip up river with his father and mother — had he on that evening-been something of what Bruce later became? It would be an odd turn of the mind if the young man had never existed — if a boy’s mind had invented him. Suppose he had just invented him later — as something — to explain his mother to himself as a means for getting close to the woman, his mother. The man’s memory of the woman, his mother, might also be an invention. A mind like Bruce’s sought explanations for everything.

  On the boat on the Ohio River, evening coming on fast. There was a town sitting high up on a bluff and three or four people had got off the boat. The niggers kept singing — singing and trotting — dancing up and down a landing-stage. A broken-down hack, to which two decrepit-looking horses were hitched, went away up along a street toward the town on the bluff. On the shore were two white men. One was small and alert and had an account-book in his hand. He was checking off the grain-bags as they were brought ashore. “One-hundred-twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.”

  “Ah, my banjo dog! Oh, ho! Oh, ho!”

  The second white man on the shore was tall and lean and there was something wild about his eyes. On the still evening air the voice of the captain of the boat, talking to Bruce’s father up above in the pilot-house or on the deck above, could be distinctly heard. “He’s a crazy man.” The second white man ashore sat at the top of the levee with his knees drawn up between his arms. His body rocked slowly to and fro in the rhythm of the singing negroes. The man had been in some kind of an accident. There was a cut on his long lean cheek and the blood had run down into his dirty beard and dried there. There was a tiny streak of red faintly seen like the streak of fiery red in the red sky of the west the boy could see when he looked away down river toward the setting sun. The injured man was dressed in ragged clothes and his lips hung open, thick lips hanging open like niggers’ lips when they sang. His body rocked. The body of the slender young man on the boat, who was trying to keep up a conversation with his companion, the broad-shouldered
man, was rocking almost imperceptibly. The body of the woman who was Bruce’s mother was rocking.

  To the boy on the boat that evening the whole world, the sky, the boat, the shore running away into the gathering darkness seemed rocking with the voices of the singing niggers.

  Had the whole thing been but a fancy, a whim? Had he, as a boy, gone to sleep on a boat with his hand gripped in his mother’s hand and dreamed it all? It had been hot all day on the narrow-decked river-boat. The gray waters running along beside the boat made a boy sleepy.

  What had happened between a small woman sitting silently on the deck of a boat and a young man with a tiny mustache who talked all day to his friend, never addressing a word to the woman? What could happen between people that no one knew anything about, that they themselves knew little about?

  As Bruce walked beside Sponge Martin and passed a woman sitting in an automobile and something — a flashing kind of thing passed between them — what did it signify?

  On the boat, that day on the river, Bruce’s mother had turned her face toward the young man, even as the boy watched the two faces. It was as though she had suddenly consented to something — a kiss perhaps.

  No one had known but the boy and perhaps — as a wild fanciful notion — the crazy man sitting on the river levee and staring at the boat — his thick lips hanging open. “He’s three-quarters white and one-quarter nigger, and he’s been crazy for ten years,” the voice of the captain explained to the school-teacher on the deck above.

  The crazy man sat hunched up ashore, on the top of the levee, until the boat was pulling away from the landing and then he got to his feet and shouted. Later the captain said he did it whenever a boat landed at the town. The man was harmless, the captain said. The crazy man with the streak of red blood on his cheek got to his feet and stood up very straight and talk His body seemed like the trunk of a dead tree growing at the levee-top. There might have been a dead tree there. The boy might have gone to sleep and dreamed it all. He had been strangely attracted to the slender young man. He might have wanted the young man near himself and had let his fancy draw him near through the body of a woman, his mother.