With the pack on her back she went painfully along across an open field, wading in the deep snow, and got into the wood. She had to go up a little hill. There wasn’t so much snow in the woods.
There was a path but it was hard to follow. Just beyond the top of the hill, where the woods was thickest, there was a small clearing. Had someone once thought of building a house there? The clearing was as large as a building lot in town, large enough for a house and a garden. The path ran along the side of the clearing and when she got there the old woman sat down to rest at the foot of a tree.
It was a foolish thing to do. When she got herself placed, the pack against the tree’s trunk, it was nice but what about getting up again? She worried about that for a moment and then closed her eyes.
She must have slept for a time. When you are about so cold you can’t get any colder. The afternoon grew a little warmer and the snow came thicker than ever. Then after a time the weather cleared. The moon even came out.
There were four Grimes dogs that had followed Mrs. Grimes into town, all tall gaunt fellows. Such men as Jake Grimes and his son always keep just such dogs. They kick and abuse them but they stay. The Grimes dogs, in order to keep from starving, had to do a lot of foraging for themselves and they had been at it while the old woman slept with her back to the tree at the side of the clearing. They had been chasing rabbits in the woods and in adjoining fields and in their ranging had picked up three other farm dogs.
All the dogs came back to the clearing after a time. They were excited about something. Such nights, cold and clear and with a moon, do things to dogs. It may be that some old instinct, come down from the time when they were wolves and ranged the woods in packs on winter nights, comes back into them.
The dogs in the clearing, before the old woman, had caught two or three rabbits and their immediate hunger had been satisfied. They began to play, running in circles in the clearing. Round and round they ran, each dog’s nose at the tail of the next dog. In the clearing, under the snowladen trees and under the wintry moon, they made a strange picture, running thus silently in a circle their running had beaten in the soft snow. The dogs made no sound. They ran and ran in the circle.
It may have been that the old woman saw them doing that before she died. She may have awakened once or twice and looked at the strange sight with dim old eyes.
She would not be very cold now, just drowsy. Life hangs on a long time. Perhaps the old woman was out of her head. She may have dreamed of her girlhood at the German’s, and before that when she was a child and before her mother lit out and left her.
Her dreams couldn’t have been very pleasant. Not many pleasant things had happened to her. Now and then one of the Grimes dogs left the running circle and came to stand before her. The dog thrust his face close to hers. His red tongue was hanging out.
The running of the dogs may have been a kind of death ceremony. It may have been that the primitive instinct of the wolf, having been aroused in the dogs by the night and the running, they were afraid.
“Now we are no longer wolves. We are dogs, the servants of men. Keep alive man. When man dies we become wolves again.”
When one of the dogs came to where the old woman sat with her back against the tree and had thrust his nose close to her face he seemed satisfied and [went] back to run with the pack. All the Grimes dogs did it at some time, during the evening, before she died. Tar Moorehead knew all about it afterwards, when he grew to be a man, because once in a wood on another winter night he saw a pack of dogs act [just] that way. The dogs were waiting for him to die as they had waited for the old woman that night when he was a child [but] when it happened to him he was a young man and had no intention of dying.
The old woman died softly and quietly. When she was dead and when one of the Grimes dogs had come to her and had found her dead all the dogs stopped running.
They gathered about her.
Well, she was dead now. She had fed the Grimes dogs when she was alive, what about now?
There was the pack on her back, the grain bag containing the piece of salt pork, the liver the butcher had given her, the dog meat, the soup bones. The butcher in town, having been suddenly overcome with a feeling of pity, had loaded her grain bag heavily. It had been a big haul for the old woman.
A big haul for the dogs now.
One of the Grimes dogs sprang suddenly out from among the others and began worrying the pack on the old woman’s back. Had the dogs really been wolves that one would have been the leader of the pack. What he did all the others did.
All of them sank their teeth into the grain bag the old woman had fastened with ropes to her back.
They dragged the old woman’s body out into the open clearing. The worn-out old dress was quickly torn from her shoulders. When she was found, a day or two later, the dress had been torn from her body clear to the hips but the dogs had not touched the body. They had got the meat out of the grain bag, that was all. Her body was frozen stiff when it was found and the shoulders were so narrow and the body so slight that in death it looked like the body of a young girl.
Such things happening in towns of the Middle West, on farms near town, when Tar Moorehead was a child. A hunter out after rabbits found the old woman’s body and did not touch it. Something, the beaten [round] path in the little snow covered clearing, the silence of the place, the place where the dogs had worried the body trying to pull the grain bag away or tear it open — something startled the man and he hurried off to town.
Tar was on Main Street with his brother John who was taking the afternoon papers to the stores. It was almost night.
The hunter came into a grocery and told his story. Then he went to a hardware shop and into a drug store. Men began to gather on the sidewalks. Then they started out along the road to the place in the wood.
Of course John Moorehead should have gone on about his business of distributing papers but he didn’t. Everyone was going to the woods. The undertaker went and the town marshal. Several men got on a dray and rode out to where the path left the road but the horses weren’t very sharply shod and slid about on the slippery roads. They made no better time than those who walked.
The town marshal was a large man whose leg had been injured in the Civil War. He carried a heavy cane and limped rapidly along the road. John and Tar Moorehead followed at his heels and as they went other boys and men joined the crowd.
It had grown dark by the time they got to where the old woman had turned out of the road but the moon had come out. The marshal was thinking there might have been a murder. He kept asking the hunter questions. The hunter went along with his gun across his shoulder, a dog following at his heels. It isn’t often a rabbit hunter has a chance to be so conspicuous. He was taking full advantage of it, leading the procession with the town marshal. “I did not see any wounds. She was a young girl. Her face was buried in the snow. No, I didn’t know her.” As a matter of fact the hunter had not looked closely at the body. He had been frightened. She might have been murdered and someone might spring out from behind a tree and murder him. In a woods, in the late afternoon, when the trees are all bare and there is white snow on the ground, when all is silent, something creepy steals over the body. If something strange or uncanny has happened in the neighborhood jail you think about is getting away from there as fast as you can.
The crowd of men and boys had got to where the old woman had crossed the field and went, following the marshal and the hunter, up the slight incline and into the woods.
Tar and John Moorehead were both silent. John had his bundle of papers in a bag slung across his shoulder. When he got back to town he would have to go on distributing his papers before he went home to supper. If Tar went with him, as John had no doubt already determined he should, they would both be late. Either Tar’s mother or his sister would have to warm their supper.
Well, they would have something to tell. A boy did not get such a chance often. It was lucky they just happened to be in the grocery when the hu
nter came in. The hunter was a country fellow. Neither of the boys had ever seen him before.
Now the crowd of men and boys had got to the clearing. Darkness comes quickly on such winter nights but the full moon made everything clear. The two Moorehead boys stood near the tree, beneath which the old woman had died.
She did not look old, lying there frozen, [not] in that light. One of the men turned her over in the snow and Tar saw everything. His body trembled and so did his brother’s. It might have been the cold.
Neither of them had ever before seen a woman’s body. It may have been the snow, clinging to the frozen flesh, that made it look so white, so like marble. No woman had come with the party from town but one of the men, he was the town blacksmith, took off his overcoat and spread it over her. Then he gathered her into his arms and started off to town, all the others following silently. At that time no one knew who she was.
Tar had seen everything, had seen the round [track] in the snow, like a miniature race track, where the dogs had rim, had seen how the men were mystified, had seen the white bare young-looking shoulders, had heard the whispered comments of the men.
The men were simply mystified. They took the body to the undertaker’s and when the blacksmith, the hunter, the marshal and several others had got inside they closed the door. If Dick Moorehead had been there perhaps he could have got in and could have seen and heard everything, but the [two] Moorehead boys couldn’t.
Tar went with his brother John to distribute the [rest of his] papers and when they got home it was John who told the story.
Tar kept silent and went to bed early. It may have been he was not satisfied with the way John told the story.
Later, in the town, he must have heard other fragments of the old woman’s story. He remembered her going past the Moorehead house when he was ill. She was recognized the next day and there was an investigation. The husband and son were found somewhere and brought to town and there was an attempt to connect them with the woman’s death but it did not work. They had perfect enough alibis.
The town was however against them. They had to get out. Where they went Tar never heard.
He remembered only the picture there in the forest, the men standing about, the naked, girlish-looking figure, face down in the snow, the [circle] made by the running dogs and the clear cold winter sky above. White fragments of clouds were drifting across the sky. They went racing across the little open space among the trees.
The scene in the forest had become for Tar, without his knowing it, the foundation for a story a child could not understand and it needed understanding. The fragments had to be picked up slowly long afterwards.
Things happened. When Tar was a young man he went to work on the farm of a German. There was a hired girl and she was afraid of her employer. The farmer’s wife hated her.
Tar saw things at that place. Once later, on a winter night, he had a half uncanny, mystical sort of adventure with dogs in a forest on a clear moonlit night. When he was a school boy, and on a summer day, he went with a boy friend out along a creek some miles from town and came to the house where the old woman had lived. No one had lived in the house since her death. The doors were broken from the hinges, the window lights were all broken. As the boy and Tar stood in the road outside two dogs, just roving farm dogs no doubt, came running around a corner of the house. The dogs were tall gaunt fellows and came to the fence and glared through at the boys standing in the road.
The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to Tar as he grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.
The woman who died was one of those who feed [animals]. From childhood she had been feeding animal life, in men, in cows, in chickens, in pigs, in horses, in dogs. She spent her life feeding all sorts of [animals]. The experience with her husband was a purely animal experience. Her having children was an animal experience. Her daughter had died in childhood and with her one son she had apparently no human relations. She fed him as she fed her husband. When her son grew up he brought a woman to the house and the old woman fed them, saying nothing. On the night when she died she was hurrying homeward, bearing on her body food for animals.
She died in the clearing in the woods and even after her death continued feeding the animal life in the dogs that had trotted out of the town at her heels.
CHAPTER XIII
SOMETHING HAD BEEN bothering Tar for a long time. It got worse during the summer of his thirteenth year. His mother had not been very well for a long time but that summer she seemed to get better. [Now Tar, rather than John, sold the papers] but that did not take much time. As his mother wasn’t very well and had other younger children to take her time she couldn’t pay much attention to [Tar].
He and Jim Moore went off to the woods on afternoons. Sometimes they just lazied around and sometimes they went fishing or swimming. Up along the creek farmers were working in the fields. When they went swimming, in a place called “Mama Culver’s Hole,” other boys from town came. Young men sometimes came down across the fields to the creek. There was one young man who was subject to fits. His father was the town blacksmith [who had carried the dead woman out of the woods]. He went in swimming, just as the others did, but someone had to watch him [all the time]. Once he had a fit in the water and had to be pulled out so he wouldn’t drown. Tar saw that, saw the man lying naked on the bank of the creek, saw the queer look in his eyes, the queer jerky movements of his legs, arms and body.
The man muttered words Tar couldn’t understand. It might have been like a bad dream you have sometimes at night. [He] only looked for a moment. Pretty soon the man got up and dressed. He walked slowly about in a field, his head hanging down, went to sit with his back against a tree. How pale he was.
When the older boys and young men came to the swimming hole Tar and Jim Moore lit out. Older boys in such a place like to take it out on the youngsters. They throw mud on small boys’ bodies after they come out from swimming and are partly dressed. When it hits you you have to go in and wash yourself off again. Sometimes they do it a dozen times.
Then they hide your clothes or dip them in the water and tie knots in the sleeve of your shirt. When you want to dress and go away you can’t.
[A gentle lot — small-town boys — sometimes.]
They take a shirt sleeve and dip it in the water. Then they tie a hard knot and pull as hard as they can and a boy has a hard time getting it untied. If he has to take his teeth to it the older boys in the water laugh and shout. There is a song about it full of words worse than you could hear in any livery stable. “Chaw beef,” the older boys yell. Then they shout out the song. The whole place rings with it. It isn’t any fancy singing.
The thing that troubled Tar troubled Jim Moore too. Sometimes when they were alone together, in the woods away up the creek beyond the regular swimming hole, they went in together. Then they came out and lay naked on the bank of the creek on the grass in the sun. It felt good.
[Then] they began to talk about things they had heard, at school, among the young men at the swimming hole.
“Suppose you ever got a chance with a girl, what then?” Maybe little girls going home together from school, no boys about, talk the same way.
“Oh, I won’t get any such chance. I’d be afraid, I guess, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess you get over being afraid. Let’s go.”
You can talk and think about a lot of things and then, when you come home where your mother and sister are, it doesn’t seem to count much against you. If you had a chance and did something it might be different.
Sometimes when Tar and Jim were lying like that, on the creek bank, one of them touched the other’s body. It was a queer feeling. When it happened they both sprang up and began to run about. Some young trees grew by the creek bank up that way and they climbed the trees. The trees were small, smooth and slender and the boys pretended they were monkeys or some other kind of wild young ani
mals. They kept on doing it for a long time, both acting rather crazy.
Once when they were doing it a man came along and they had to run and hide in some bushes. They were in a close place and had to he close together. After the man passed they went at once to get their clothes, both feeling strange.
Strange about what? Well, how are you going to tell? All boys are that way sometimes.
There was a boy Jim and Tar both knew, who had the nerve to do anything. Once he was with a girl and they went into a barn. The girl’s mother saw them go in and followed. The girl got a whipping. Neither Tar nor Jim thought anything really happened but the boy said it did. He bragged about it. “It isn’t the first time.”
Such talk. Tar and Jim thought the boy lied. “He wouldn’t have the nerve — do you think?”
They talked about such things more than they wanted to. They couldn’t help it. When they had talked a lot they both felt uncomfortable. Well, how are you going to find out anything? When men are talking you listen all you can. If the men see you hanging around they tell you to get out.
Tar saw things, taking papers to houses in the evening. There was a man used to come with a horse and buggy and wait in a certain place in a dark street and after a while he was joined by a woman. The woman was married and so was the man. Before the woman came the man had put on the side curtains to his buggy. They drove away together.
Tar knew who they were and after a time the man knew he knew. One day he met Tar on the street. The man stopped. He bought a paper. Then he stood looking at Tar with his hands thrust into his pockets. The man owned a large farm, several miles from town, and his wife and children lived out there but he was in town nearly all the time. He was a buyer of farm products, shipping them off to nearby cities. The woman Tar had seen get into the buggy was the wife of a merchant.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 134