His father kept talking in the thick angry voice and the faces kept appearing and disappearing. The meal progressed but Tar did not eat. The faces seen in the shadows did not frighten, they filled the child with wonder.
He sat by the table looking occasionally at his angry father and from him to the men who had so mysteriously come into the room. How glad he was his mother was there. Did the others see what he saw?
The faces now dancing on the walls of the room were the faces of men. Sometime he would himself be a man. He watched and waited but as his father talked did not connect the faces with the words of condemnation that were coming from his lips.
Jim Gibson, Curtis Brown, Andrew Hartnett, Jacob Wills — men of an Ohio countryside, who had bought harnesses of a small harness maker and then had not paid. Names were themselves something to think about. Names were like houses, they were like pictures people hang on the walls of a room. When you see a picture you do not see what the man saw who painted the picture. When you go into a house you do not feel what the people feel who live in the house.
Names called out make a certain impression. Sounds also make pictures. There are too many pictures. When you are a child and ill the pictures crowd in upon each other too fast.
Now that he was ill Tar sat too much alone. On rainy days he sat by a window inside the house and on fair days sat on a chair on the porch.
His illness had made him habitually silent. All during his illness Tar’s older brother John and his sister Margaret had been kind. John, who nowdays had much business going on, in the yard and in the road, and who was often visited by other boys, came to bring him marbles and Margaret came to sit with him and tell him happenings at school.
Tar sat staring about and saying nothing. How could he tell anyone what was going on inside? There was too much going on inside. With his weak body he could do nothing but inside his body there was intense activity.
Something peculiar there was, down inside, something constantly being torn apart and then joined together again. Tar did not understand and never did understand.
For one thing everything kept going far away. There was a tree at the side of the road before the Moorehead house that kept coming out of the ground and floating away into the sky. Tar’s mother came to sit in the room with him. She was always at work. When she was not bending over the wash tub or over the ironing board, she was sewing. She also, the chair in which she sat, even the walls of the room, seemed to float away. Something inside Tar struggled constantly to bring everything back and put everything in its place. If things would only stay in their places how calm and nice life would be.
Tar knew nothing of death but was afraid. Things that should be small became large, things that should remain large became small. Often Tar’s own hands, white and small, seemed to leave his arms and float away. They floated away over the tops of the trees seen through the window, almost disappeared into the sky.
Not to have everything disappear was Tar’s problem. It was a problem he could not explain to anyone, and absorbed him completely. Often the tree that had come out of the ground and had floated away became merely a black dot in the sky but it was his problem not to lose sight of it. If it happened that you lost sight of the tree you lost sight of everything. Tar did not know why that was true but it was. Grimly he held on.
If he held on the tree would come back, everything would come back. Someday he would get all adjusted again.
If Tar held on things would at last be all right. Of that he was quite sure.
The faces in the street before the houses in which the Mooreheads had lived had sometimes floated across the fancy of the sick boy as now in the kitchen of the Moorehead house the faces were floating on the wall back of the stove.
Tar’s father kept calling new names and new faces kept coming. Tar had grown very white.
The faces on the wall appeared and disappeared faster than ever. Tar’s white small hands gripped the edges of his chair.
Had it become a test for him to follow with his fancy all of the faces, must he keep track of them as he did of the trees when they seemed to float into the sky?
The faces had become a whirling mass. His father’s voice seemed far away.
Something slipped. Tar’s hands that had been gripping so tightly the edges of his chair let go their hold and with a little sigh he slipped from the chair to the floor, into the darkness.
CHAPTER V
IN THE TENEMENT districts of American cities, among the poor in small towns, strange things to be seen by a boy. Most of the houses in small Middle-western towns are without dignity. They are cheaply made, thrown together. The walls are thin. Everything was done in a hurry. What goes on in one room is known to the child who is ill in the next room. Well, he knows nothing. What he feels is another matter. He cannot tell what he feels.
At times Tar resented his father as he resented the fact of younger children. While he was still weak with illness, that time after the drunken episode, his mother was pregnant. He did not know the word, did not know definitely that another child was coming. Still he did know.
Sometimes, on warm clear days, he sat in a rocking-chair on the front porch. At night he lay on a cot in a room next to the father and mother’s room, downstairs. John, Margaret and Robert were asleep upstairs. The baby lay in the bed with the father and mother. There was another baby in there, not born yet.
Tar had already seen things, heard things.
Before he became ill his mother was tall and slender. When she worked in the kitchen there was a babe lying on a chair, among pillows. For a time the baby fed at the breast. Then he began feeding from a bottle.
What a little pig! The eyes of the baby were screwed up in a peculiar way. He was crying before he got the bottle and then, when he had got it into his mouth, he stopped at once. The tiny face got red. When the bottle was empty the baby slept.
When there is a baby in the house there are always unpleasant smells. Women and girls do not mind.
When your mother becomes suddenly round like a barrel there is a reason. John and Margaret knew. It had happened before. Some children do not apply what they see and hear going on around them to their [own] lives. Others do. The three older children did not speak to each other of what was in the air. Robert was too young to know.
When you are a child and ill, as Tar was at that time, you get human things all mixed up in the mind with the animal life about. Cats screamed at night, cows bawled in the barns, dogs ran in packs along the road before the house. Something always stirring — in people, in animals, trees, flowers, grasses. How are you going to tell what is gross, what is fine? Kittens were born, calves, colts. Neighbor women had babies. A woman who lived near the Mooreheads had two at one time [ — twins]. Judging from what people said hardly anything more tragic [than that] could happen.
Boys in small towns, after they begin going to school, write things on fences with chalk they steal from the schoolroom. They make pictures on the sides of barns and on the sidewalks.
Even before he began going to school Tar [knew things]. [How had he found out?] His being ill may have made him more [aware]. There was a queer feeling down inside — fear growing [in him]. His mother, his own relation to the tall woman going about the Moorehead house doing her housework, was in some way involved.
Tar’s being ill made things difficult. He could not run about the yard, play ball, go off on adventurous trips to nearby fields. When the baby had his bottle and was asleep his mother brought her sewing and sat beside him. All was still in the house. If things could only stay like that. Now and then her hand stroked his hair and when she stopped he wanted to ask her to go on doing it always but could not get his lips to form the words.
Two boys of the town, John’s age, went one day to a place where a small creek crossed a street. There was a wooden bridge with cracks between the boards and the boys crawled down under the bridge and lay quietly for a long time. They wanted to see something. Afterwards they came into the Moorehead
yard and talked to John. Their being under the bridge had something to do with women crossing above. When they came to the Moorehead house Tar was sitting among pillows in the sun on the front porch and when they began to talk he pretended to be asleep. The boy who told John about the adventure whispered when he came to the important part but to Tar, who lay back among the pillows with his eyes closed, just the sound of the boy’s voice whispering was like cloth being torn. It was like a curtain being torn so that you stand facing — what? [Nakedness perhaps. It takes time and maturity to get strength to face nakedness. Some never get it. Why should they? The dream may be more important than the fact. It depends on what you want.]
On another day Tar was in the same chair on the porch and Robert was playing in the street [outside]. He went off down the road to where there was a field and presently came running back. In the field he had seen something he wanted Tar to see. He could not tell what it was but his eyes were large and round and he whispered one word over and over. “Come, come on,” he whispered and Tar got up out of the chair and went with him.
Tar was at that time so weak that as he hurried along at Robert’s heels he had to stop several times to sit beside the road. Robert danced restlessly about in the dust in the middle of the road. “What is it?” Tar kept asking but his younger brother could not tell. If Mary Moorehead had not been so occupied with the babe already born and the one about to be born she might have kept Tar at home. Among so many children one child gets lost.
The two children came to the edge of a field surrounded by a rail fence. Elders and berry bushes grew thick between the fence and the road and they were in bloom [now]. Tar and his brother crawled in among the bushes and looked through the fence, between the rails.
What they saw was startling enough. No wonder Robert was excited. A sow had just given birth to a litter of pigs. It must have happened while Robert was running to the house [to bring Tar].
The mother pig stood facing the road and the two [wide-eyed] children. Tar could look directly into her eyes. It was all a part of the day’s work with her, a part of the female pig’s life. It happened just as the trees happened to put on green leaves in the spring, just as the berry bushes happened to bloom and later bear fruit.
Only with trees, grasses, berry bushes, things were hidden from sight. Trees and bushes did not have eyes across which the shadows of pain flitted.
The mother pig stood for a moment and then lay down. She still [seemed looking] directly at Tar. There was something on the grass beside her, a squirming mass of life. The secret inner life of pigs was being revealed to [the children]. The mother pig had stiff white hairs growing on her nose and her eyes were heavy with weariness. Often Tar’s mother’s eyes looked like that. The children were so near the [mother] pig that Tar could have put out his hand and touched her hairy snout. Always, after that morning, he remembered the look in [her] eyes, the squirming things beside her. When he grew to be a man and was himself tired or ill he walked in city streets and saw [many] people with that look in their eyes. People crowded into city streets, into tenements in cities, were like squirming things on the grass at the edge of an Ohio field. When he turned his eyes to the sidewalk or closed them for a moment he saw again a mother pig trying to stand on her trembling legs, lying down on the grass and then getting wearily up.
For a moment Tar watched the scene before him and then, lying down on the grass under the elders, closed his eyes. His brother Robert went away. He crawled away to where the bushes grew thicker, already looking for some new adventure.
Time passed. The elders in bloom beside the fence were very fragrant and bees came in swarms. They made a droning soft sound in the air above Tar’s head. He felt very weak and sick and wondered if he would be able to make his way back [home]. As he lay thus a man came along the road and, as though sensing the boy’s presence under the bushes, stopped and stood staring.
The man was a half witted fellow who lived several doors away from the Mooreheads and on the same street. He was thirty years old but had the mind of a child of four. All Middle-western towns have such fellows. All their lives they remain gentle or one of them becomes suddenly vicious. In small towns they live with relatives who are usually working people and [they] are neglected by everyone. People give them old clothes, too large or too small for their bodies.
[Well, they are of no use. They earn nothing. They must be fed and have a place to sleep until they die.]
The half witted man did not see Tar. He may have heard the mother pig moving about in the field beyond the bushes. Now she had got to her feet and the little pigs — five of them — were being cleansed and prepared for life. Already they were at the business of being fed. When feeding little pigs make a sound like a baby. They screw up their eyes in the same way. Their faces get red and after they have been fed they sleep.
Some sense in feeding little pigs. They grow big rapidly and may be sold for money.
The half witted man stood looking toward the field. Life may be a comedy half witted people understand. The man opened his mouth and laughed softly. In Tar’s memory the scene and the moment remained unique. It seemed to him afterward that, at the moment, the sky overhead, the bushes with their blossoms, the bees droning in the air, even the ground on which he lay had begun to laugh.
[And then] the new [Moorehead] baby was born. It happened at night. Such things usually do. Tar was in the front room of the [Moorehead] house, wide awake, but he managed to create the impression that he was asleep.
At first, that night when it began, there was the sound of someone groaning. It did not sound like Tar’s mother. She never groaned. Then someone moved restlessly in the bed in the next room. Dick Moorehead [was awake]. “Had I better get up?” A low voice answered and there was another groan. Dick hurried about getting into his clothes. He came into the front room, carrying a lamp, and stood by Tar’s cot. “He’s asleep in [here]. Had I better wake him up and take him upstairs?” More whispered words intercepted by [more] groans. The lamp in the bedroom shed a faint light through the open door into the room.
They had decided to let him remain. Dick put on his overcoat and went out the back way, through the kitchen door. He had put on the coat because it was raining. The rain made a steady pounding sound on the side of the house. Tar could hear his footsteps on the boards leading round the house to the front gate. The boards were merely thrown on the ground and some of them had become old and warped. When you stepped on them you had to be careful. In the darkness Dick had bad luck. There was a low muttered curse. He was standing [out there] in the rain rubbing his shin. Tar heard his footsteps on the sidewalk outside and then the sound grew faint. It could not be heard above the steady sound of the rain on the side walls of the house.
[°Tar lay], listening intensely. He was like a young quail crouched [down] under leaves when a dog is ranging a field. Not a muscle of his body moved. In a household like the Mooreheads’ a child does not run instinctively to the mother. Love, warmth, the natural expression of [tenderness], all such [impulses] are buried away. Tar had to live his own life, lie quiet and wait. Most Middle-western families [of the old days] were like that.
Tar lay [in the bed] listening [a long time]. His mother groaned softly. She stirred [about] in her bed. What was going on?
Tar knew because he had seen the pigs born in the field, [he] knew because what was happening in the Moorehead house was always happening in some house on a street in which the Mooreheads lived. It happened to neighbor women and to horses, to dogs, to cows. Chickens, turkeys and birds got born out of eggs. That was much better. The mother bird did not groan with pain [while it was going on].
It would have been better[Tar thought,] if he had not seen the thing in the field, if he had not seen the look of pain in a mother pig’s eyes. His own illness had been something special. His body was weak sometimes but there was no pain. It was a thing of dreams, of distorted dreams that would not come to an end. He always, when the bad times were on, had to hold onto
something to keep from falling [away] into nothingness, into some black cold [dismal] place.
If Tar had not seen the mother pig in the field, if older boys had not come into the yard and talked [to John]....
The mother pig, standing in the field, had a look of pain in her eyes. She made a sound that was like a groan.
She had long dirty white hairs on her nose.
The sound coming from the nearby room did not seem to come from Tar’s mother. She was to him something lovely. [Birth was ugly, shocking. It could not be her.] [“He clung to that thought. What was going on was shocking. It could not happen to her.] That was a comforting thought [when it came]. He held onto [the thought]. There was a trick his illness had taught him. When [he felt he was] about to fall into darkness, into nothingness, [he] just hung on. There was something inside him that helped.
Once that night, during the period of waiting, Tar crept out of bed. He was quite sure his mother was not in the next room, that it was not her he heard groaning [in there] but he wanted to be [quite sure]. He would creep to the door and look. When he had got his feet to the floor and stood upright the groans in the room stopped. “Well, you see,” [he told himself.] “what I heard was just made up.” He got silently back into bed and the groans started again.
His father came with the doctor. He had never been to the house before. Such things happen unexpectedly. The doctor you plan to get is out of town. He had gone off to [a] patient in the country. You do the best you can.
The doctor [who had come] was a large man with a great voice. He came into the house with his booming voice and a neighbor woman also came. Tar’s father came and closed the door that led into the bedroom.
Again he got out of bed but did not go toward the door leading to the bedroom. He knelt beside the cot and felt around until he had got hold of the pillow and then buried his face. He pressed the pillow against his cheeks. In that way it was possible to shut out all sounds.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 128