It was fun enough to hear the old carpenter talk but more fun to make up your own talk, build your own world.
The colored pictures in the papers John sold on Saturdays had become indeed alive. In fancy Tar had grown to be a man and what a brave one. He took part in all of the desperate scenes, changed them about, thrust himself into the very midst of the swirl and hurly-burly of life.
A world of grown people moving about and Tar Moorehead among them. Somewhere in the crowd on the street John was now running about selling his papers. He [pushed] them under people’s noses, showed the colored pictures. Like a grown man John went into saloons, into the stores, into the court house.
Soon now, Tar himself would be grown. It could not possibly take very long. How long though the days sometimes seemed.
With his mother he threaded his way through the crowd. Men and women spoke to his mother. A tall man did not see Tar and knocked against him. Then another very tall man with a pipe in his mouth gave him a regular bang.
The man wasn’t so nice. He apologized and gave Tar a nickel but that did not do any good. It was the way he did it that hurt more than the bang. Some men think a child is only a child.
And now they had got off Main Street and into the one where Dick had his shop. There were plenty of people on Saturday nights. Across the street was a two-storied building in which a dance was being held. It was a square dance and a man’s voice was calling off. “Do-se-do. Gentlemen all lead to the right. Balance all.” The whining voices of fiddles, laughter, many voices talking.
[Into the shop they went.] Dick Moorehead was as yet able to put on some style. He had still the watch with the heavy silver chain and for the Saturday evening’s rush had been shaved and had waxed his mustache. A silent old man, much like the carpenter who came to visit Tar’s mother, was employed in the shop and was there now at work, seated on his wooden horse. He was sewing a strap.
It seemed to Tar that the life led by his father was something magnificent. When the woman and the child came into the shop Dick ran at once to a drawer and taking out a handful of money offered it to his wife. It may have been all the money he had but that Tar did not know. Money was something with which you bought things. You had it or you did not have it.
As for Tar he had money of his own. He had the nickel the man on the street had given him. When the man had banged him and had given him the nickel his mother had asked sharply, “Well, Edgar, what do you say?” and he had replied by looking at the man and saying rudely, “Give me some more.” It had made the man laugh but Tar had not seen the sense of his laughing. The man had been rude and he had been rude too. His mother was hurt. It was [very] easy to hurt his mother.
In the shop Tar was seated on a chair at the back and his mother was on another chair. She had taken but a few of the coins offered by Dick.
Again there was talk. Grown people are always indulging in talk. A half dozen farmers were in the shop and when Dick had offered the money to his wife he did it with a flourish. Dick did everything with a flourish. That was his nature. He said something about the cost of women and children. He was being rude like the man on the street but Dick’s being rude never [mattered]. He [did not] mean what he said.
[And] anyway Dick was a man of affairs.
How he bustled about. Men kept coming into the shop bringing harnesses and throwing them down with a bang on the floor. The men talked and Dick [also] talked. He talked more than all the others. At the back of the shop there was only Tar, his mother and the old man on the horse sewing the strap. The man was like the carpenter and the doctor who came to the house when Tar was at home. He was small and shy and spoke timidly, asking Mary Moorehead about the other children and the baby. Presently he got off the bench and coming to Tar gave him another nickel. How rich Tar was getting. This time he did not wait for his mother to ask but said at once what he knew he should say.
Tar’s mother had gone away and left him in the shop. Men came and went. They talked. With some of the men Dick went out into the street. A business man who has taken an order for a new harness is expected to set-em-up. Each time when he came back from such a trip Dick’s eyes shone more brightly and the mustache stood out straighter. He came and stroked Tar’s hair.
“He’s a bright one,” he said. Well, Dick was bragging [again].
It was better when he talked to the others. He told jokes and the men laughed. When the men were doubled up with laughter Tar and the old harness maker on the horse looked at each other and also laughed. It was as though the old man had said, “We’re out of it, my boy. You are too young and I am too old.” As a matter of fact the old man said nothing [at all]. It was all imagined. All the best things for a boy are always imagined. You sit in a chair at the back of your father’s shop on a Saturday night while your mother goes to the stores and such thoughts you have. There is the sound of the fiddle in the dance hall outside in the street and the nice sound of men’s voices far away. At the front of the shop there is a hanging lamp and harnesses are hanging on the walls. All is neat and in order. Harnesses have silver buckles, they have buckles of brass. Solomon had a temple and in the temple were shields of brass. There were vessels of silver and gold. Solomon was the wisest man in the world.
In a harness shop on a Saturday evening the oil lamps hanging from the ceiling sway a little. Everywhere bits of brass and silver. The lamps, when they sway, make tiny lights appear and disappear. The lights dance, men’s voices are heard, there is laughter, the sound of a fiddle. In the street outside people are walking up and down.
CHAPTER IV
FOR THE BOY as for the man there is the world of fancy and the world of facts. Sometimes the world of facts is very grim.
Solomon had vessels of silver, he had vessels of gold, but Tar Moorehead’s father was not a Solomon. Within a year after the Saturday evening when Tar sat in his father’s shop seeing the bright glitter of the buckles in the swaying lights the shop had been sold to pay Dick’s debts and the Mooreheads were living in another town.
All summer Dick had been working as a house painter but now cold weather had come and he had got a job. He was now but a workman in a harness shop and sat on the harness maker’s horse sewing straps. The silver watch and the watch chain were gone.
The Mooreheads lived in a mean little house and all through the fall Tar had been ill. As the fall advanced there was a time of bitter cold days and then there came a period of soft [warm] days.
Tar sat on the porch wrapped in a blanket. Now the corn in distant fields was in shocks and the other crops had been hauled away. In a small field near at hand where the corn crop had not been good a farmer had gone into the field to pick the corn and then had turned cows into the field to nibble at the stalks. In the woods the red and yellow leaves were falling fast. With every gust of wind they flew like brightly colored birds across the field of Tar’s vision. In the com field the cows making their way among the dry standing corn stalks made a low crashing sound.
Dick Moorehead had names Tar had never heard before. One day when he sat on the porch of the house a man with a board balanced across his shoulder came along the road past the house and seeing Dick Moorehead coming out at the front door stopped and spoke to him. He called Dick Moorehead “Major.”
“Hello, Major,” he shouted.
The man’s hat was tilted jauntily on the side of his head and he smoked a pipe. After he and Dick had gone off along the road together Tar got up out of his chair. It was one of the days when he felt quite strong. The sun was shining.
Going around the house he found a board fallen out of a fence and tried to carry it as had the man in the road, balancing it on his shoulder as he walked up and down a path in the back yard, but it fell and an end of it hit him on the side of the head raising a large bump.
Tar went back to sit alone on the front porch. There was to be a new baby in the house. He had heard his father and mother speak of it at night. With three children in the house younger than himself it was time he
grew up.
His father was called “Captain” and “Major.” Tar’s mother sometimes called her husband “Richard.” How grand to be a man and have so many names.
Tar had begun to wonder if he would ever be a man. How long to wait! How annoying to be sick and not [to be] able to go to school.
Nowdays, immediately after he had bolted his food, Dick Moorehead hurried away from the house. At night he did not come home until all had gone to bed. In the new town he had joined a brass band and belonged to several lodges. When he did not have to work in the shop at night there was always a lodge to attend. Although his clothes had grown shabby Dick wore two or three brightly colored badges in the lapel of his coat and on special days gayly colored ribbons.
One Saturday evening when Dick came home from the shop something had happened.
All the house felt it. It was dark in the street outside and the evening meal had been waiting for a long time. When at last the children of the house heard their father’s footsteps on the sidewalk that led from the gate to the front door all became silent.
How very strange. The footsteps came along the hard road outside and then stopped before the house. Now the front gate had opened and Dick was going around the house to the kitchen door where all the rest of the Moorehead family were sitting and waiting. It was one of the days when Tar felt strong and [he] had come to the table. When the footsteps were still in the road outside his mother stood silently in the middle of the room but as they moved about the house she hurried to the stove. When Dick came to the kitchen door she did not look at him and all through the evening meal, eaten in a strange new kind of silence, she did not speak to her husband or to the children.
Dick had been drinking. Many times when he came home during that fall he had been drinking but the children had never before seen him when he was really off balance. When he had come along the road and the path that led around the house all of the children had recognized his footsteps that were at the same time not his footsteps. There was something wrong. All in the house felt it. Each step was taken uncertainly. The man had, quite deliberately perhaps, surrendered something of himself to some power outside himself. He had surrendered control over his faculties, his mind, his fancy, his tongue, the muscles of his own body. He was for the time quite helpless in the hands of something his children could not understand. There was a kind of assault upon the spirit of the house. At the kitchen door he a little lost control over himself and had to catch himself quickly, his hand on the door frame.
When he got into the room and had put aside his hat he went at once to where Tar sat. “Well, well, how are you little monkey?” he cried, standing before Tar’s chair and laughing, a little foolishly. No doubt he felt the eyes of all the others upon him, felt the frightened silence of the room.
To pass it off he took Tar up in his arms and tried to go toward his place at the head of the table, to sit at the table. He almost fell. “How big you are getting,” he said to Tar. He did not look at his wife.
Being in his father’s arms was like being in the top of a tree pitched and tossed by a wind. When Dick had managed to get his balance again he got to the chair and sitting down put his cheek against Tar’s. For several days he had not shaved and there was a half grown beard that hurt Tar’s face and his father’s long mustache was wet. His breath smelled of something strange and pungent. The smell made Tar a little ill but he did not cry. He was too frightened to cry.
The fright of the child, of all the children in the room, was something special. The feeling of discouragement that had for months brooded over the house had come to a head. Dick’s drunkenness was a kind of assertion. “Well life has proven to be too much of a job. I shall let things go. There is a man in me and there is something else. I have tried being a man but I cannot make it. Look at me. Now I have become what I am. How do you like it?”
Watching his chance Tar crept out of his father’s arms and went to sit near his mother. All of the children of the household had instinctively edged their chairs along the floor so that the father was left quite alone, with a wide open space on either side. Tar felt feverishly strong. His brain was making strange pictures, one after the other.
He kept thinking of trees. Now his father was like a tree in the middle of a great open meadow, a tree tossed by a wind, a wind all the others, standing at the edge of the meadow, could not feel.
The strange man who had suddenly come into the house was Tar’s father and was at the same time not his father. The man’s hands kept making uncertain movements. There were baked potatoes for supper and he tried to begin serving the children by sticking a fork into a potato but missed and the fork struck on the side of the dish. It made a sharp metallic sound. He tried two or three times and then Mary Moorehead, getting up from her place, walked around the table and took the dish away. Having been served all began eating in silence.
The silence was unbearable to Dick. There was a kind of accusation in it. All of life, now that he was married and the father of children, was a kind of accusation. “There is too much accusation. A man is what he is. You are expected to grow up, be a man, but what if you are not made that way?”
It was true Dick drank, that he did not save money, but other men were that way. “There is a lawyer in this very town who gets drunk two or three times every week but you look at him. He is successful. He makes money and dresses well. With me everything is a muddle. To tell the truth I made a mistake in being a soldier and going back on my father and brothers. I have always been making mistakes. Being a man is not so easy as it seems.
“I made a mistake when I married. I love my wife but I have been able to do nothing for her. Now she shall see me as I am. My children shall see me as I am. What do I care?”
Dick had worked himself into a state. He began to talk, addressing not his children or his wife but the kitchen stove that stood in a corner of the room. The children were eating in silence. All had grown white.
Tar turned to look at the stove. How odd, he thought, that a grown man should be talking to a stove. It was a thing such as a child like himself might have done when alone in a room but a man was a man. As his father talked he saw in fancy and quite distinctly the faces of people appearing and disappearing in the darkness back of the stove. The faces, called into being by the voice of his father, emerged quite distinctly out of the darkness back of the stove and then as rapidly disappeared. They danced in the air, became large and then small.
Dick Moorehead talked as though making a speech. There were certain men who, when he lived in another town and owned a harness shop, when he was a man of business and not, as now, a mere workman, had not paid for harnesses bought in his shop. “How can I get along if they do not pay?” he asked aloud. Now he held a small baked potato balanced on the end of a fork and began waving it about. Tar’s mother was looking at her plate but his brother John, his sister Margaret and his younger brother Robert were all looking at their father with staring eyes. As for Tar’s mother, when something happened she did not [understand or of which she did not] approve she went about the house with a strange lost look in her eyes. The eyes frightened. They frightened Dick Moorehead as well as the children. All became self-conscious, afraid. It was as though she had been struck a blow and when you looked at her you felt at once that your hand had delivered the blow.
The room in which the Mooreheads now sat was lighted only by a small oil lamp on the table and by the glow from the stove. As it was already late in the fall darkness had come. In the kitchen stove were many cracks through which ashes and bits of burning coal sometimes fell. The stove was bound together with wires. The Mooreheads were indeed very hard up just at that time. They had reached the low stage in all the memories Tar afterward kept of his childhood.
Dick Moorehead declared his position in life a terrible one. In the house [sitting] at the table he kept looking into the darkness back of the kitchen stove and thinking of the men who owed him money. “Look at me. I am in a certain position. Well I hav
e a wife and children. I have these children to feed and men owe me money they do not pay. I am down and out and they laugh at me. I want to do my part like a man but how can I manage?”
The drunken man began calling out a long list of names of men who he declared owed him money and Tar listened filled with wonder. It was an odd circumstance that when he grew to be a man and became a writer of tales Tar remembered many of the names called out by his father that evening. Many of them were afterwards attached to characters in stories of his.
His father called off names and condemned the men who had not paid for harnesses bought when he was prosperous and owned a shop of his own but Tar did not afterward connect the names with his father or with any injustice done to his father.
Something had happened [to Tar]. [Tar] sat on a chair near his mother facing the stove in the corner.
Light appeared and disappeared on the wall. As Dick talked he held the small baked potato balanced on the end of a fork.
The baked potato made dancing shadows on the face of the wall.
The outline of faces began to appear. As Dick Moorehead talked a movement began in the shadows.
One by one the names were called and then the faces appeared. Where had Tar seen the faces before? They were the faces of men seen passing the Moorehead house, faces seen traveling on trains, faces seen from the seat of the buggy that time Tar went into the country.
There was a man with a gold tooth and an old man with his hat pulled down over his eyes and these were followed by others. The man who had balanced the board on his [shoulder] and who had called Tar’s father “the Major” came out of the shadows to stand looking at Tar. The illness from which Tar had been suffering and from which he had begun to recover was now coming back. The cracks in the stove made dancing lights on the floor.
The faces Tar saw emerging so suddenly out of darkness and then so quickly disappearing he did not connect with his father. Each face as it appeared had for him a life of its own.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 127