Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  How ragged and dirty were the clothes of the crazy man! A kiss had passed between the young woman on deck and the slender young man. The crazy man shouted something. “Keep afloat! Keep afloat!” he cried, and all the niggers down below on the lower deck of the boat were silent. The body of the young man with the mustache quivered. A woman’s body quivered. A boy’s body quivered.

  “All right,” the captain’s voice shouted. “It’s all right. We’ll take care of ourselves.”

  “He’s just a harmless lunatic, comes down every time a boat comes in and always shouts something like that,” the captain explained to Bruce’s father as the boat swung out into the stream,

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SATURDAY NIGHT AND supper on the table. The old woman cooking supper — what!

  Lif’ up the skillet, put down the lid,

  Mama’s go’na make me some a-risen bread!

  An’ I ain’t go’na give you none of my jelly roll.

  An’ I ain’t go’na give you none of my jelly roll.

  A Saturday evening in the early spring in Old Harbor, Indiana. In the air the first faint promise of the hot moist summer days to come. In the lowlands up and down river from Old Harbor the river flood-waters still covered the deep flat fields. A warm rich land of growth — trees growing rank — woods and corn growing rank. The whole Middle American empire — swept by frequent and delicious rains, great forests, prairies on which early spring flowers grow like a carpet — land of many rivers running down to the brown slow strong mother of rivers, land to live in, make love in, dance in. Once the Indians danced there, made feasts there. They threw poems about like seeds on a wind. Names of rivers, names of towns. Ohio! Illinois! Keokuk! Chicago! Illinois! Michigan!

  On Saturday evening when Sponge and Bruce put away their brushes and came out of the factory, Sponge kept urging Bruce to come to his house for Sunday dinner. “You ain’t got no old woman. My old woman likes to have you there.”

  Sponge was in a playful mood, Saturday evening. On Sunday he would stuff himself with fried chicken, mashed potatoes, chicken gravy, pie. Then he would stretch himself on the floor beside his front door and sleep. If Bruce came he would manage in some vay to get a bottle of whisky and Sponge would have several long pulls at the bottle. After Bruce had taken a pull or two Sponge and his old woman would finish it. Then the old woman would sit in a rocking-chair, laughing and teasing Sponge. “He ain’t much good any more — not much juice in him. I got to be looking out for a younger man — like you maybe,” she said, winking at Bruce. Sponge laughed and rolled on the floor, grunting sometimes, like a fat clean old pig. “I got you two kids. What’s got wrong with you?”

  “Time now to think of going fishing — some pay-day night — soon now, eh, old woman?”

  On the table the dishes unwashed. The two older people slept. Sponge with his body across the open door, the old woman in her rocking-chair. Her mouth fell open. She had false teeth in the upper jaw. Flies came in at the open door and settled on the table. Feed, flies! Plenty of fried chicken left, plenty of gravy, plenty of mashed potatoes.

  Bruce had an idea the dishes were left unwashed because Sponge wanted to help clear up, but neither he nor the old woman wanted another man to see him helping do a woman’s task. Bruce could imagine a conversation between them before he came. “Look here, old woman, you let them dishes alone. You wait ‘til later, ‘til after be goes.”

  Sponge owned an old brick house that had once been a stable near the river’s edge where the stream bent away to the north. The railroad ran past his kitchen door, and in front of his house, down nearer the water’s edge, there was a dirt road. In the spring floods, sometimes, the road was under water and Sponge had to wade in water to get up to the tracks.

  In an earlier day the dirt road had been the main road into the town and there had been a tavern and a stage-coach station, but the small brick stable Sponge had bought at a low price and had converted into a house — when be was a young man and had just got him a wife — was the only indication of former grandeur left along the road.

  Five or six hens and a rooster walked in the road that was full of deep ruts. Few automobiles came that way and when the others slept Bruce stepped carefully over Sponge’s body and walked away from town along the road. When he had gone a half-mile and had left the town behind, the road turned away from the river into the hills and, just at that point, the current set in sharp against the river-bank. The road there was in danger of falling into the river and at this point Bruce loved to sit on a log near the river’s edge and look down. There was a fall of perhaps ten feet and the current was eating and eating at the banks. Logs and driftwood carried by the current almost touched the shore and then were carried out again into the middle of the stream.

  It was a place to sit, dreaming and thinking. When he grew tired of the sight of the river he went into the hill country, returning to town in the evening by a new road directly over the hills.

  Sponge in the shop just before the time when the whistle blew on Saturday afternoon. He was a man who had spent all the years of his life working and eating and sleeping. When Bruce had worked on the newspaper in Chicago he had gone out of the newspaper office in the afternoon feeling dissatisfied, empty. Often he and Tom Wills went to sit in some dark little restaurant on a side street. There was a place just over the river on the North Side where bootleg whisky and wine could be had. For two or three hours they sat drinking in the little dark place while Tom growled.

  ‘What a life for a grown man — throwing bunk — sending others out to gather up city scandal — the Jew dressing it up in gaudy words.”

  Although he was old Sponge did not seem tired when the day’s work was done but as soon as he got home and had eaten he wanted to sleep. All afternoon, on Sunday, after the Sunday dinner, at noon, he slept. Was the man entirely satisfied with life? Did his job satisfy him, his wife, the house in which he lived, the bed in which he slept? Did he have no dreams, seek nothing he could not find? When he awoke on a summer morning after a night on the sawdust pile beside the river and his old woman, what thoughts came into his mind? Could it be that, to Sponge, his old woman was like the river, like the sky overhead, like the trees on a distant river-shore? Was she to him like a fact in nature, something-about which you asked no questions — something like birth or death?

  Bruce decided the old man was not necessarily selfsatisfied. With him being satisfied or not satisfied did not count. There was in him a kind of humbleness as in Tom Wills and he liked the skill of his own hands. That gave him something to rest on in life. Tom Wills would have liked the man. “He’s got something on you and me,” Tom would have said.

  As to his old woman — he was used to her. Unlike many working-men’s wives she did not look worn out. That might have been because she had never had but two children, but also it might have been because of something else. There was a thing worth doing her man could do better than most other men. He rested in that fact and his wife rested in him. The man and woman had stayed within the limits of their powers, had moved freely within a small but clear circle of life. The old woman cooked well and she liked going off with Sponge on an occasional spree — they dignified by calling it “going fishing.” She was a tough wiry little thing and did not get tired of life — of Sponge her husband.

  Being satisfied or not satisfied with life had nothing to do with Sponge Martin. On Saturday afternoon when he and Bruce were getting ready to leave he threw up his hands and declaimed: “Saturday night and supper on the table. It’s the happiest time in a working-man’s life.” Was Bruce out for something very like Sponge had got? It might be he had left Bernice just because she did not know how to team with him. She hadn’t wanted to team with him. What had she wanted? Well, never mind her. Bruce had been thinking of her all afternoon, of her and his mother, what he could remember of his mother.

  Very likely a man like Sponge did not go around, as he did, with his brain churning — fancies drifting — a fee
ling of being all corked up — unreleased. It must be that most men got into a place, after a time, where all stood still. Little fragments of thoughts flying about in the mind. Nothing organized. The thoughts getting further and further away.

  There was a log he had once, as a boy, seen bobbing on the face of the river. It got further and further away, was presently just a tiny black spot. Then it went, disappeared into the vast flowing grayness. It did not go suddenly. When you were gazing hard at it, trying to see just how long it could be kept in sight, then —

  Was it there? It was! It wasn’t! It was! It wasn’t!

  A trick of the mind. Suppose most men were dead and did not know it. When you were alive, a surge of thoughts, fancies, through the mind. Perhaps if you got the thoughts and fancies organized a little, made them work through your body, made thoughts and fancies a part of yourself —

  They might be used then — perhaps as Sponge Martin used a brush. You might lay them on something as Sponge Martin could lay varnish on. Suppose about one man in a million got things organized a little. What would that mean? What would such a man be?

  Would he be a Napoleon, a Cæsar?

  Not likely. That would be too much bother. If he became a Napoleon or a Cæsar he would have to be thinking all the time of the others, trying to use the others, trying to wake them up. Well, no, he wouldn’t try to wake them up. If they woke up they would be just like him. “I like not his lean and hungry look. He thinks too much.” That sort of thing, eh? A Napoleon or a Cæsar would have to give others toys to play with, an army — conquests. He would have to make a display before them, have wealth, wear fine clothes, make them all envious, make them all want to be as he was.

  Bruce had many thoughts about Sponge as he worked beside him in the shop, as he walked beside him along a street, as he saw him sleeping on the floor like a pig or a dog, after stuffing himself with food his old woman had cooked. Sponge had lost his carriage-painting shop through no fault of his own. There were too few carriages to paint. Later he might have set up a shop to paint automobiles if he had wanted to, but it was likely he was getting too old for that. He would keep on painting wheels, talking of the time when he did own a shop, eating, sleeping, getting drunk. When he and his old woman were a little drunk she seemed like a kid to him and he became like a kid, for a time. How often? About four times a week, Sponge said once, laughing. He might have been bragging. Bruce tried to imagine himself Sponge at such a moment, Sponge lying on the sawdust pile beside the river with his old woman. He couldn’t do it. What got mixed up in such fancies was his own reaction to life. He couldn’t be Sponge, the old workman robbed of his position as a master workman — drunk and trying to be like a kid with an old woman. What happened was that at the thought certain unpleasant experiences of his own life came up to mock him. Once he had read a book by Zola, “La Terre,” and later, but a short time before he left Chicago, Tom Wills had shown him a new book by the Irishman Joyce, “Ulysses.” There were certain pages. A man named Bloom standing on a beach near some women. A woman, Bloom’s wife, in her bedroom at home. The thoughts of the woman — her night of animalism — all set down — minutely. Realism in writing lifted up sharp to something burning and raw like a raw sore. Others coming to look at the sores. For Bruce, to try to think of Sponge and his wife in their hour of pleasure in each other, such pleasure as youth knew, was like that. It left a faint unpleasant smell in his nostrils — like decayed eggs — dumped in a wood — across the river — far off.

  Oh, Lord! Was his own mother — on the boat, that time they saw the crazy man and the young fellow with the mustache — was she, at that moment, a kind of Bloom?

  Bruce did not want that thought. The figure of Bloom had seemed true to him, beautifully true, but it had sprung out of a brain not his. A European, a Continental man — that Joyce. Over there men had lived in one place a long time and had deposited something of themselves everywhere. A sensitive man walking there, living there, got it into his being. In America much of the land was still new, unsoiled. Hang on to the sun, the wind and the rain.

  A LAME ONE

  TO J. J.

  At night when there are no lights, my city is a man who arises from a bed to stare into darkness.

  In the daytime my city is the son of a dreamer. He has become the companion of thieves and prostitutes. He has denied his father.

  My city is a thin little old man who lives in a rooming-house in a dirty street. He wears false teeth that have become loose and make a sharp clicking sound when he eats. He cannot find himself a woman and indulges in self-abuse. He picks cigar-ends out of the gutter.

  My city lives in the roofs of the houses, in the eaves. A woman came to my city and he threw her far down, out of the eaves onto a pile of stones. Those who live in my city declare she fell.

  There is an angry man whose wife is unfaithful. He is my city. My city is in his hair, in his breath, in his eyes. When he breathes his breath is the breath of my city.

  There are many cities standing in rows. There are cities that sleep, cities that stand in the mud of swamps.

  My city is very strange. It is tired and nervous. My city has become a woman whose lover is ill. She creeps in the hallways of a house and listens at the door of a room.

  I cannot tell what my city is like.

  My city is a kiss from the feverish lips of many tired people.

  My city is a murmur of voices coming out of a pit.

  Had Bruce fled from his own city, Chicago, hoping to find, in the soft nights of a river town, something to cure him?

  What was he up to? Suppose it was something like this — suppose that young man in the boat had suddenly said to the woman sitting there with the child, “I know you aren’t going to live very long and that you will not have any more children. I know everything about you that you, yourself, cannot know.” There might be such a thing as moments when men and men, women and women, men and women could get like that toward each other. “Ships that pass in the night.” It was the sort of thing it made a man seem silly to himself to think about definitely but it was quite sure there was something that people like himself, his mother before him, that young man on the river packet, people scattered about, here and there, that they were after.

  Bruce’s mind flopped back. Since he had left Bernice he had done a lot of thinking and feeling he had never done before and that was something gained. He might not be getting anywhere in particular but he was having fun of a sort and he wasn’t bored as he had formerly been. The hours in the shop varnishing wheels did not cut much figure. You could varnish wheels and think of anything you pleased and the more skillful your hands became the more freedom your mind and your fancy had. There was a kind of pleasure in the passing hours. Sponge, the unmalicious, the man child, playing, bragging, talking, showing Bruce how to varnish wheels accurately and well. It was the first time in his life Bruce had ever done anything well with his hands.

  If a man got so he could use his own thoughts, his own feelings, his own fancies as Sponge could use a paint-brush, what then? What would the man be like?

  Would that be what an artist was? It would be a fine to-do, if he, Bruce, in running away from Bernice and her crowd, from the conscious artists, had only done so because he wanted to be just what they wanted to be. Men and women in Bernice’s crowd were always talking of being artists, speaking of themselves as artists. Why had men, like Tom Wills and himself, a kind of contempt for them? Did he and Tom Wills secretly want to be artists of another sort? Was that what he, Bruce, had been up to when he lit out from Bernice and when he came back to Old Harbor? Was there something in the town he had missed as a boy there — he wanted to find — some string he wanted to pick up?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SATURDAY EVENING AND Bruce walking out at the shop door with Sponge. The other workman, the surly man at the next bench, had gone hurriedly out just ahead of them, had hurried out without saying good-night and Sponge had winked at Bruce.

  “He wants to
get home quick to see if his old woman is still there — wants to see if she has gone off with that other chap she is always fooling with. He comes to her house in the afternoon. No danger his wanting to take her. He’d have to support her then. She’d go fast enough if he asked her but he won’t. Much better let this one do the work and make the money to feed and clothe her, eh?”

  Why had Bruce called Sponge unmalicious? Lord knows he was malicious enough. There was a thing called manhood, maleness, he had, and that he was proud of — as he was of his craftsmanship. He had got his own woman fast and hard and had contempt for any man who couldn’t do the same thing. His contempt had no doubt leaked across to the workman beside him and had made him more surly than he would have been had Sponge treated him as he did Bruce.

  When he came into the shop in the morning Bruce always spoke to the man at the second wheel-peg and he thought the man sometimes looked at him wistfully, as though to say, “If I could get a chance to tell you, if I knew how to tell you there would be my side to the story, too. I’m what I am. If I lost one woman I wouldn’t ever know how to go at it to get me another. I ain’t the kind that get ’em easy. I ain’t got the nerve. To tell the truth, and if you only knew it, I’m a good deal more like you than this Sponge. With him everything is down in his hands. He gets everything out of him through his hands. Take his woman away and he would get another with his hands. I’m like you. I’m a thinker, a dreamer maybe. I’m the kind that makes a mess of his life.”

  How much easier for Bruce to be, in fancy, the surly silent workman than for him to be Sponge. Still it was Sponge he liked, wanted to be like. Did he? Anyway he wanted to be, partly, like him.