The man put a five dollar bill into Tar’s hand. “I guess you know enough to keep your mouth shut,” he said. That was all.
After he said it the man tamed and went away. Tar had never had so much money, had never before had any money he did not expect to account for. It was an easy way to get it. When any of the Moorehead children made any money they gave it to their mother. She never asked anything of the sort. It just seemed the natural thing to do.
Tar bought himself a quarter’s worth of candy, he bought a package of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. He and Jim Moore would try smoking them sometime when they were off in the woods. Then he bought a swell necktie that cost fifty cents.
That was all right. He had a little more than four dollars in his pocket. He had got the change in silver dollars. Ernest Wright, who kept a small hotel in town, was always standing in front of his hotel with a pile of silver dollars in his hands, playing with them. At the fair, in the fall, when there were a lot of fakers from out of town come for the fair, they set up little booths for gambling. You could get a cane by throwing a ring over it or a gold watch or a revolver by picking out the right number on a wheel. There were lots of such places. One year Dick Moorehead, being out of work, got a job in one of them.
At all such places little piles of silver dollars were stacked about up where everyone could see them. Dick Moorehead said a farmer or a hired man had about as much chance to win any of the money as a snowball had in hell.
It was nice though to see the silver dollars piled up, nice to see Ernest Wright jingling silver dollars in his hands as he stood on the sidewalk before his hotel.
Nice for Tar to have four big silver dollars he did not feel he had to account for. They had just come down into his hand, out of the sky, as it were. The candy he could eat, the cigarettes he and Jim Moore would try smoking someday soon. The new necktie would be a little difficult. Where would he tell the others at home he had got it? Most boys of his age in town never got any fifty cent neckties. Dick didn’t get but about two new ones a year — when there was a G.A.R. convention or something. Tar might say he had found it and found the four silver dollars, too. Then he could give the money to his mother and forget it. It was fine to feel the heavy silver dollars in his pocket but he had got them in a strange way. Silver is much better to have than bills. It feels like more.
When a man is married you see him with his wife and you do not think anything [about it] but a man like that, waiting in a buggy in a side street, and then a woman coming along, trying to act as though she is going to call on some neighbor — it being night and supper over and her husband gone back to his store. Then the woman looking around and getting, quick, into the buggy. They driving off with the curtains drawn, that way.
Plenty Madame Bovaries in American small towns — what!
Tar wanted to tell Jim Moore but didn’t dare. There was a kind of agreement between himself and the man from whom he had taken the five dollars.
The woman knew he knew as well as the man. He had come out of an alleyway bare-footed, making no sound, with a bundle of papers under his arm, had popped right out on them.
Maybe he did it purposely.
The woman’s husband took a morning paper at his store and had an afternoon paper delivered at his house. It was a funny feeling to go into his store afterwards and see him there, talking to some man, knowing nothing, Tar, just a kid, knowing such a lot.
Well, what did he know?
The trouble is that such things set a boy thinking. You want to see a lot and when you see something it stirs you up and makes you almost wish you hadn’t. The woman, when Tar took the paper to her house, never let on. She had a nerve all right.
Why did they go sneaking out that way? A boy knows but doesn’t know. If Tar could only have talked it over with John or Jim Moore it would have been a relief. You can’t talk about such things to someone in your own family. You have to go outside.
Tar saw other things. Win Connell, who worked in Cary’s drug store, married Mrs. Grey, after her first husband died.
She was taller than he was. They took a house and furnished it with her first husband’s furniture. One evening, when it was raining and dark, only about seven o’clock, Tar went along back of their house on his paper route and they had forgot to close the window blinds. They didn’t have a thing on, either of them, and he was chasing her around. You would never think grown people could act like that.
Tar was in the alleyway, just as he was that time he saw the people in the buggy. By cutting through alleyways you save time [delivering papers] when a train is late. There he stood, holding his papers under his coat so they wouldn’t get wet, and there were the two grown people acting like that.
There was a kind of living room and a stairway going upstairs and then some other rooms on the ground floor, without any lights in them.
What Tar saw first was the woman running like that, without any clothes on, across the room and her husband after her. It made Tar laugh. They were like monkeys. The woman ran upstairs and he after her. Then down she came again. They dodged into the dark rooms and then out again. He caught her sometimes but she must have been slippery. She got away every time. They kept it up and kept it up. Such a crazy thing to see. There was a couch in the room Tar was looking into and once she got behind it and he was in front. He put his hands on the top of the couch and sprang clear over. You wouldn’t have thought [a drug clerk] could do it.
Then he chased her into one of the dark rooms. Tar waited and waited but they did not come out.
A fellow like Win Connell had to work, after supper, at the store. He would get dressed and go down there. People coming in to get prescriptions put up, to buy a cigar maybe. Win standing back of the counter smiling. “Is there anything else? Certainly, if it is not satisfactory bring it back. We aim to please.”
Tar going away out of his way, being later than ever to supper, to go past Cary’s drug store and look in, to see Win in there, just like any other man, doing what he did all the time every day. And less than an hour ago....
Win wasn’t so very old but he was already baldheaded.
The world of older people opening out gradually to a boy going around with his papers. Some older ones seemed to have a lot of dignity. Others hadn’t. Boys, Tar’s own age, had secret vices. Some of the boys at the swimming hole did things, said things. When men get older they grow sentimental about the old swimming hole. They remember only the pleasant things that happened. There is a trick of the mind that makes you forget [the] unpleasant [things]. It’s just as well. If you could see life clear and straight maybe you couldn’t live.
A boy goes around town filled with curiosity. He knows where the vicious dogs are, what people speak kindly to him. There are soreheads everywhere. You can’t get a thing out of them. If the paper is an hour late they growl and fuss at you. What the deuce. You don’t run the railroad. If the train is late it isn’t your fault.
That Win Connell doing that. Tar laughed about it sometimes at night in bed. How many other people cutting up all kinds of capers behind the blinds of houses? In some houses men and women were always quarreling. Tar came along the street and opening a gate went into a yard. He was going to put the paper under the back door. Some wanted it put there. As he went around the house the sound of quarreling inside. “I didn’t either. You’re a liar. I’ll knock your damn head off. Try it once.” The low growling voice of a man, the sharp cutting voice of an angry woman.
Tar tapped on the back door. It might be his collection night. Both the man and woman came to the door. They both thought it might be some neighbor and that they had been caught quarreling. [“Well, it’s only a boy.”] When they saw it was only [Tar] a look of relief on the two faces. The man paid Tar with a growl. “You’ve been late twice this week. I want my paper to be here when I get home.”
The door was slammed and Tar hung about for a moment. Would they start quarreling again? They did. Maybe they liked it.
At night streets
of houses with closed blinds. Men coming out at the front door to go uptown. They went into saloons, into the drug store, into the barber shop or the cigar store. There they sat bragging, sometimes, sometimes just being quiet. Dick Moorehead did not quarrel with his wife but just the same he was one thing at home and another when he was out in the evening among men. Tar had slid in among groups of men when his father was holding forth. He slid out pretty fast. Dick had to sing pretty low at home. Tar wondered why. It wasn’t because Mary Moorehead scolded him.
In nearly every house he visited either the man or woman ruled the roost. Downtown, among the other men, [a man was] always trying to create the impression [he was] boss. “I said to my old woman — look here, I said — you do so and so. You bet she did it.”
Did it eh? In most of the houses Tar visited it was as at the Moorehead house — the women were the strong ones. Sometimes they ruled by bitter words, sometimes by tears, sometimes by silence. Silence was Mary Moorehead’s way.
PART IV
CHAPTER XIV
THERE WAS A girl, Tar’s age, came to visit Colonel Farley’s house on Maumee Street. The street went out past the Farley place and ended at the town cemetery. The Farley Place was the last one on the street but one, an old [rickety] house where the Thompsons lived.
The Farley house was large and had a cupola on top. There was a low hedge in front facing the road and an apple orchard at the side. At the back of the apple orchard was a large red barn. It was one of the swellest places in town.
The Farleys were people who were always nice to Tar after he began selling papers but he did not see them often. Colonel Farley had been in the war like Tar’s father and was a married man when he went in. He had two sons, both of whom had gone to college. Then they went away to live in some city and they must have got rich. Some said they had married rich women. They sent money home to the Colonel and his wife, plenty of it. The Colonel was a lawyer but hadn’t much practise — just fooled around getting pensions for old soldiers and that sort of thing. Sometimes he did not go to his office all day. Tar saw him sitting on the front porch of the house reading a book. His wife sat sewing. She was small and fat. When he collected for the paper the Colonel always gave Tar an extra nickel. Such people, Tar thought, [were] all right.
They had another old couple living with them. The man took care of their carriage and drove the Colonel and his wife out on fine afternoons and the woman cooked and did the housework. Everyone had it pretty soft at that house, Tar thought.
They weren’t much like the Thompsons who lived beyond them out that street, right by the cemetery gate.
The Thompsons were a tough lot. There were three grown sons and a girl Tar’s age. Tar hardly ever saw old Boss Thompson or the boys. They went every summer with a circus or a street fair. One year they had a stuffed whale on a box car.
They had canvas all around it and went around to towns and charged ten cents to look at it.
When they were at home the Thompsons, father and sons, hung around the saloons and bragged. Old Boss Thompson always seemed to have plenty of money but he made his women folks live like dogs. His old woman never had a new dress and looked all worn out while the old man and the boys were always strutting in Main Street. That year they had the whale old Thompson wore a plug hat and always had on a fancy vest. He liked to go into a saloon or a store and take out a big roll of bills. If he had a nickel in his pocket when he wanted some beer he never showed it. He took out a ten dollar bill, peeled it off a big roll and threw it on the bar. Some men said most of the roll was made up of one dollar bills. The boys were the same sort but they did not have so much money to strut with. The old man kept everything for himself.
The girl that came to visit the Farleys in the summer was their son’s daughter. Her father and mother had gone to Europe so she was going to stay until they came back. Tar heard about it before she came — such things get about town pretty fast — and [there he] was on hand at the railroad station to get his bundle of papers, when she came in.
She was pretty all right. Well, she had blue eyes and yellow hair and wore a white dress and white stockings. The Colonel and his wife and the old man who drove their carriage met her at the station.
Tar had got his papers — the baggage man always threw them off on the station platform at his feet — and he hustled to see if he could sell some to people getting off and on the train. When the girl got off — she had been put in charge of the conductor and he [handed] her off himself — the Colonel came over to where Tar stood and asked for his paper. “I can just as well save you coming clear out our way,” he said. He was holding the girl’s hand. “This is my [granddaughter], Miss Ester Farley,” [he said]. Tar went all red. It was the first time anyone had ever introduced him to a lady. He did not know what to do so he took off his cap but did not say a word.
The girl didn’t even blush. What she did was just to stare at him.
“Lordy,” Tar thought. He didn’t want to wait to see her again until he had to take the paper to the Farleys’ the next day, [so] he went out that way in the afternoon, but never saw a thing. The worst was that when he went out past the Farleys’ he had to do one of two things. The street did not go anywhere, just went to the cemetery gate and stopped and he had to go on into the cemetery, through it and out over a fence [and] into another street, or come back again past the Farleys’. Well, he did not want the Colonel, his wife or the girl to think he was hanging around.
The girl had got him all stirred up, right off. It was the first time that had happened. He dreamed of her at night and did[n’t] even dare speak of her to Jim Moore. One day Jim said something about her. Tar got red. He had to begin talking of something else [quick]. He couldn’t think what to say.
[Tar] began going off by himself. It he went out the railroad tracks a mile — toward the little town of Greenville — then turned off through the fields, he came to a creek that did not run through [his] town at all.
He could go that way clear to Greenville if he wanted to. He did once. It was only five miles. It was nice to be in a town where he did not know a soul. The main street was only half as long as the one in his own town. People he had never seen were standing in the store doors, strange people walking in the streets. They looked at him with curiosity in their eyes. In his own town he had now become a familiar figure, running around with the papers mornings and evenings.
The reason he liked to go off by himself that summer was that, when he was alone, he could fancy the new girl was with him. Sometimes when he took the paper he saw her at the Farley house. She even came out sometimes to take the paper from him and did it with a self-possessed smile on her face. If he was disconcerted in her presence she wasn’t.
She said “good morning” to him and all he could do was to mutter something she could not hear. Often when he was going around with the papers in the afternoon he saw her riding with her grandfather and grandmother. They all spoke to him and he took off his cap, awkwardly.
After all, she was only a girl like his sister Margaret.
When he went out of town alone, in the summer afternoons, he could imagine she was with him. He took hold of her hand as they walked along. He wasn’t afraid then.
The best place to go was to a beech woods about a half mile back from the tracks.
The beech trees grew in a little grassy gully that led down to the creek and on the hill above. There was a branch of the creek in the gully in the early spring but during the summer it dried up.
There isn’t any woods like a beech woods, Tar thought. Under the trees the ground was clear, no small bushes growing, and there were places among the big roots that stuck up out of the ground where he could lie as in a bed. Everywhere squirrels and chipmunks darted about. When he had been still a long time they came [pretty] close. Tar could have shot any number of squirrels that summer and perhaps if he had and had taken them home to be cooked it would have helped the Mooreheads a good deal, but he never took a gun [with him].
/> John had one. He had got it cheap second-handed. Tar could have borrowed it easy enough. He did not want to.
He wanted to go to the beech woods because he wanted to dream of the new girl in town, wanted to pretend she was with him. When he got to the place he settled his body down in a good comfortable place among the roots and closed his eyes.
There was the girl, close beside him, in fancy[of course]. He did not talk [to her] much. What was to be said? He took her hand in his, held her hand against his cheek. Her fingers were so soft and small that when he held her hand his own looked big like the hand of a man.
He was going to marry the Farley girl when he grew up. That he had decided. He did not know just what marriage meant. Yes he did. The reason he was so ashamed and blushed so when he went near her was because he was always having such thoughts when she wasn’t [near]. First he would have to grow up and go to the city. He would have to get as rich as she was. That would take time but not so long. Tar made four dollars a week selling papers. He was in a town where there weren’t many people. If the town were twice as large he would make twice as much — if four times as [large] four times as much. Four times four is sixteen. In a year there are fifty-two weeks. Four times fifty-two is two hundred and eight dollars. Lordy, that’s a lot.
And he wouldn’t be selling just papers. Maybe he’d get him a store. Then he would have him a carriage or an automobile. He would ride up in front of her house.
Tar tried to imagine what the city house the girl lived in when she was at home could be like. The Farley house on Maumee Street was about the grandest place in town but the wealth of Colonel Farley didn’t amount to anything against that of his sons in the city. Everyone in town said that.
In the beech woods, during the summer afternoons, Tar closed his eyes and dreamed the hours away. Sometimes he went to sleep. Nowdays he was always lying awake in bed at night. In the woods he could hardly tell the difference between sleeping and waking. All that summer no one in his own family seemed to pay any attention to him. He just came and went at the Moorehead house, mostly in silence. Sometimes John or Margaret spoke to him. “What’s the matter with you?”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 135