Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  In the morning sounds from the neighboring houses and from the barns. Some of the neighbors kept pigs and chickens that lived in pens in the back yard and were fed from the table scraps.

  In the mornings the pigs grunted, the cocks crowed, the hens made soft clucking sounds, the horses neighed, the cows bawled. Calves were born — strange fascinating creatures with long ungainly legs on which they, at once and in a funny uncertain manner, began to walk, following the mother cow about the barn yard.

  In Tar’s mind later a dim memory of early mornings in bed, his older brother and sister at a window. Already, in the Moorehead house of the moment, another baby had been born, perhaps two babies since Tar’s turn. Babies did not get up and walk about like calves and colts. They lay on their backs in bed sleeping like puppies or kittens and then they awoke to make dreadful noises.

  Children, just coming into consciousness of life, as Tar was at that time, do not fancy younger children about. Kittens are something and puppies something else. They lie in a basket back of the kitchen stove. It is nice to put the hand into the warm nest in which they lie sleeping but other babies of one’s own family about the house are a nuisance.

  How much better a dog or a kitten. Cows and horses are for rich people but a dog or a cat the Mooreheads might have had. How gladly would Tar have traded a baby for a dog and as for a horse — it was well he was not tempted. If the horse were gentle and would let him ride on its back or if he could sit alone in a cart and hold the reins over a horse’s back, as did an older neighbor boy in one of the towns in which he lived, he might have traded off the whole Moorehead family.

  In the Moorehead house they had a saying. “The baby has put your nose out of joint.” What a terrible saying! The new baby cried and Tar’s mother went to take it into her arms. There was some strange connection between the mother and the baby that Tar, who had begun walking about the floor, had already lost.

  He was four, his older sister seven and the first born son of the household nine. Now, in some odd way that was not understandable, he belonged to the world of his older brother and sister, to the world of neighbor children, to the front and back yard into which other children came to play with his brother and sister, to a tiny section of the great world in which he would presently have to try to live, not really to his mother at all. His mother was already a dark strange being, a little far off. He might still cry and she would call to him and he might run and put his head in her lap while she stroked his hair but there was always that later child, the baby, far up there in her arms. His nose was indeed out of joint. What would set it straight?

  To cry and win favor that way was already a shameful trick in the eyes of his older brother and sister.

  Surely Tar did not want to remain always a baby. What did he want?

  How huge the world. How strange and terrible it was. His older brother and sister, out in the yard at play, were so impossibly old. If they would only stand still, stop growing, stop getting older for two or three years. They wouldn’t. Something told him that would not happen.

  And now his tears had stopped, already he had forgotten what made him cry as though he were still a babe. “Run now and play with the others,” his mother said.

  But how difficult the others! If they would only stand still until he caught up.

  A spring morning in the house on a street in a Mid-American town. The Moorehead family changed towns as they did houses, slipping them on and off as one slips on and off a night dress. Between them and the others in the town a kind of separateness. The ex-soldier, Dick Moorehead, had never got himself settled [again] after the war. Marriage had perhaps upset him. Now was the time to become a solid citizen and he was not made to be a solid citizen. Towns and the years slipped away together. A procession of little houses in grassless lots that had no barns, a procession of streets, of towns too. Tar’s mother was always busy. There were so many children and they came so fast.

  Dick Moorehead had not married a rich woman, as perhaps he might have done. He married the daughter of an Italian working woman but she had beauty. It was a strange kind of dark beauty to be found in the Ohio town where he had met her after the war and it [had] fascinated him. It always fascinated Dick and his children.

  Now, however, while children were coming so fast, no one had time to breathe, to look out. Tenderness between people grows slowly.

  A spring morning in a house on a street in a Mid-American town. Tar now a grown man and a writer was staying at the house of a friend. His friend’s life had been utterly unlike his own. The house was surrounded by a low garden wall and Tar’s friend was born in it and had lived in it all his life. He, like Tar, was a writer but what a difference in the two lives. Tar’s friend has written many books — all histories of men who lived in another age — books of men at war, great generals, politicians, explorers.

  All the man’s life had been lived in books while Tar’s life had been lived in the world of men.

  Now the friend had a wife, a gentle soft-voiced woman Tar could hear moving about in a room upstairs in the house.

  Tar’s friend was in his workroom reading. He was always reading, while Tar seldom read. His children played in the garden. There were two boys and a girl and an old negro woman looked out for them.

  Tar sat in a corner of the porch at the back of the house under rosebushes thinking.

  On the day before he and his friend had a talk. The friend spoke of some of Tar’s books, raising his eyebrows. “I like you,” he said, “but some of the people you write about. I never saw any [of the] people. Where are they? Such thoughts, such terrible people.”

  What Tar’s friend had said of his books others had said. He thought of the years his friend had spent over books, of the life the man had lived behind the garden wall while Tar had knocked about. Even then, as a grown man, he had no house of his own. He was an American, had always lived in America and America was vast, but not a square foot of it had ever belonged to him. His father had never owned a square foot of it.

  Gypsies, eh? Worthless kind of people in an age of property. If you want to be something in this world own lands, own goods.

  When he had written books about people the books had often been condemned, as they were condemned by his friend, because the people in the books were of the common sort, because they often did mean commonplace things.

  “But I am myself a commonplace man,” Tar said to himself. “It is true my father wanted to be a man of distinction and he was also a teller of tales, but the tales he told would never hold water.

  “Dick Moorehead’s tales went well enough with the farmers and the farm hands who used to come into his harness shops when he was a young man but suppose he had been compelled to write them out for people — like the man in whose house I am now visiting,” Tar thought.

  And then his mind leaped back to his own childhood. “Surely childhood is always distinguished,” he said to himself. “It is only when we grow up that we become common and vulgar. Has there ever been such a thing as a vulgar child? Could there be such a thing?”

  As a grown man Tar thought much on the subject of childhood and houses. He sat in one of the little rented rooms in which he as a man was always living and his pen slipped over the paper. It was early spring and he thought the room nice enough. There was a fire.

  He had begun again, as he was always beginning, on the theme of houses, places in which people live, into which they come at night and when it is cold and stormy outside the house — houses with rooms in which people sleep, in which children sleep and dream.

  The later Tar was a little cracked on the subject. The room in which he sat, he told himself, contained his body but it contained also his thoughts. Thoughts were as important as bodies. How many people tried to make their thoughts color the rooms in which they slept or ate, how many tried to make the rooms a part of themselves. At night when Tar was in bed and when there was a moon, shadows played on the walls and his fancies also played. “Do not befoul the hous
e in which the child must live and remember that you are also a child, will always be a child,” he whispered to himself.

  In the East when a guest came to a house his feet were washed. “Before I invite the reader into the house of my fancy I should see that the floors are cleaned, that the doorsills have been washed.”

  Houses were like people standing silently and at attention, along a street.

  “If you honor and respect me and come into my house come softly. For the moment think gentle thoughts, leave quarrels and the ugliness of your life outside my house.”

  There is the house and to the child the world outside the house. What is the world like? What are people like? Older people, neighbor men and women, men and women who walked along the sidewalk before the Moorehead house when Tar was a small child went straight on about their affairs.

  A woman named Mrs. Welliver was going toward that mysteriously exciting place known as “uptown” with a market basket on her arm. Tar, the child, had never been beyond the nearest corner.

  A day came. What an event! A neighbor woman, who must have been rich as she had two horses in the barn back of her house, had come to take Tar and his sister — [“three] years older — for a ride in a buggy. They were to go into the country.

  They were to go far out into a strange world, through Main Street. In the early morning they were told and Tar’s older brother, who was not to go, was angry, while Tar was made happy by his brother’s misfortune. There were so many things the older brother already had. He wore pants while Tar still wore skirts. There was something to be gained then by being small and helpless. How Tar had wanted to come to the time of pants. Willingly enough, he thought, would he have traded the trip into the country for his brother’s additional five years and the pants but why should the brother expect all of the good things of this life? The older brother wanted to cry because he was not going but how many times had Tar wanted to cry because of things the brother had that Tar could not have.

  They set out and Tar was excited and happy. What a huge strange world. The little Ohio town was to Tar’s eyes a vast city. Now they had come into Main Street and there was an engine attached to a train, a great terrifying thing. The horse half ran across the tracks in front of the nose of the engine, a bell clanged. Tar had heard that sound before — at night in the room where he slept — the clanging of an engine bell in the distance, the scream of a whistle, the crashing rumble sound of a train rushing through town, out in the darkness and silence, outside the house, outside the windows and the wall of the room where he lay.

  In what way was the sound different from the sounds that came from horses, from cows, sheep, pigs and chickens? Warm friendly sounds the others. Tar himself cried, he screamed when he was angry. Cows, horses and pigs also made sounds. The animal sounds belonged to a world of warmth, of nearness, while the other sound was strange romantic and terrible. When Tar heard the sound of the engine at night he crept closer to his sister and said nothing. If she awoke, if his older brother awoke, they would laugh at him. “It’s only a train,” they said, their voices filled with contempt. It had seemed to Tar that something [gigantic] and terrible was about to crash through walls into the room.

  On the day of his first great voyage out into the world and when the horse, a creature of flesh and blood like himself, frightened by the breathing of the great iron horse, had carried the buggy rushing past, he turned to stare. There was smoke issuing from the engine’s long up-thrust nose and the dreadful metallic clang of a bell rang in his ears. A man put his head out of the cab window and waved his hand. He spoke to another man standing on the ground beside the engine.

  The neighbor woman was pulling at the fines and striving to quiet the excited horse who had infected Tar with his fright, and his sister, filled with her three additional years of worldly knowledge and a little contemptuous of him, put her arms about his shoulders.

  And now the horse was trotting sedately along and they all turned to look back. The engine had begun to move slowly, majestically pulling its train of cars. How fortunate that it did not choose to follow along the road they had taken. It had crossed the road and was going away, past a row of small houses toward distant fields. Tar’s fright passed. In the future and when he was awakened by the sound of a passing train at night he would not be afraid. When his brother, two years younger, grew a year or two older and became frightened at night he could speak to him with contempt in his voice. “It’s only a train,” he could say, scorning his younger brother’s childishness.

  They drove on, over a hill and across a bridge. At the top of a hill they stopped and Tar’s sister pointed to the train moving across a valley below. Far off there in the distance, going away, the train seemed beautiful and Tar clapped his hands with delight.

  As it was to the child so it was to be to the man. Trains moving across distant valleys, the rivers of automobiles that flowed through modern city streets, squadrons of aeroplanes in the sky, all of the wonders of the modern mechanical age, when seen from a distance, filled the later Tar with wonder and awe but when he drew near to them he was afraid. Power, hidden away, deep down in the belly of an engine, made him tremble. Where did it come from? The words “fire,”

  “water,”

  “oil” were old words signifying old things but the combining of these things within iron walls from which, at the touch of a button or a lever, power sprang seemed the work of a devil — or a god. He did not pretend to understand devils or gods. Men and women were difficult enough.

  Was he an old man in a new world? Words and colors might be combined. In the world his imagination could sometimes penetrate blue did something strange when combined with red. Words might be thrown together and sentences made and the sentences had uncanny power. With a sentence one might destroy a friendship, win a woman, make a war. The later Tar walked unafraid among words but what happened within the narrow walls of steel was never understandable to him.

  But now he was still a child and was being driven out into the vast world and was already a little frightened and homesick. His mother, who was already too much separated from him by [an]other [and later child up there in her arms], was nevertheless the rock on which he was trying to build the house of his life. Now he was on shifting sands. The neighbor woman looked strange and forbidding. She was occupied in driving the horse. The houses along the road were far apart. There were wide open spaces, fields, great red barns, orchards. What a [huge] world!

  The woman who had taken Tar and his sister for the ride must have been very rich. She had a house in town, with two horses in the barn, and also owned a farm in the country where there were a house, two large barns, and horses, sheep, cows and pigs without number. They turned into a driveway with an apple orchard on one side and a corn field on the other and went into a farm yard. Home seemed to Tar thousands of miles away. Would he know his mother when he returned? Could they ever find their way back? His sister was laughing and clapping her hands. A wobbly-legged calf was tied to a rope on the lawn before the house and she pointed at it. “Look, Tar,” she cried, and he did look with serious thoughtful eyes. Already he was beginning to realize something of the utter frivolity of women.

  They were in a bam yard, facing a large red barn, and a woman came out at the back door of the house and two men emerged from the barn. The farm woman looked not unlike Tar’s mother. She was tall and her fingers were long and roughened by toil like his mother’s fingers. Two children clung to her skirt as she stood by the door.

  There was talk. Women were always talking. What a little chatterbox his sister already was. One of the men from the barn, no doubt the husband of the farm woman and the father of the strange children, came forward but had little to say. The people from town had got out of the buggy and the man, after mumbling some few words, went away again to the barn accompanied by one of the two children and while the women continued talking he emerged from the barn door, a child, a boy like Tar but two or three years older, astride a great farm horse the fa
ther was leading.

  Tar was left with the women, his sister and the other farm child, also a girl.

  What a come-down for him! The two women having gone into the farm house he was left with the two girls. In this new world it was as at home in his own yard. At home his father was gone all day at his shop and his older brother had little use for him. The older brother thought of him as a babe but Tar was no longer a babe. Was there not another child in his mother’s arms? His sister took care of him. Women ran everything. “You take him and the little girl to play with you,” the farm woman said to her daughter, pointing to Tar. The woman touched his hair with her fingers and [the two women] smiled. How far [away] everything seemed. At the door one of the women stopped to give other instructions. “Remember he is only a babe. Do not let him get hurt.” What an idea!

  The boy of the farm sat astride the farm horse and a second man, no doubt a hired man, came out at the bam door leading another horse but did not offer to take Tar aboard. The men and the farm boy went off along a lane beside the barn and toward distant fields, the boy on the horse turning to look back, not however at Tar but at the two girls.

  The girls with whom Tar had been left looked at each other and laughed. Then they led the way to the barn. Well, Tar’s sister was up to her tricks. Did he not know her? She wanted to hold his hand, pretend she was his mother, but he would not let her. It was a thing girls did. They pretended they were taking care of you when they were only showing off. Tar marched sturdily along wanting to cry because he had been dropped suddenly in a [huge] strange place but not wanting to give his sister, but three years older than himself, the satisfaction of showing off before the strange girl by mothering him. If women would but do their mothering in secret how much better it would be.

  Tar was now so altogether alone in the midst of such vast strange beautiful and at the same time [terrifying surroundings], How warmly the sun shone. Long, long afterward, oh [how many] many times afterward, he was to dream over the scene, use it as a background for tales, use it all his life as a background for some great dream he was always having of someday owning his own farm, a place of great barns with unpainted timber beams, grown steely grey with age, of the rich smell of hay and animals, of sun-washed and snow-covered hills and fields and smoke going up out of the chimney of a farm house into wintry skies.