Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  The river that went below the mill and the railroad tracks wound around. You could go to Main Street, in Langdon, and turn to the right and get into a road that went on out to the fair. You walked through a street of nice houses, not all alike, as in a mill village, but each one different, with yards and grass and flowers and girls sitting on the porch, no older than Doris herself, but not married, not with a man and kid and a sick mother-in-law, and you got to a flat place by the same river that went past the mill.

  Grace would eat her supper quickly after her day in the mill and she would clean up quickly. You get to eating quickly when you eat alone. You don’t care what you eat. She would clean up and do the dishes quickly. She was tired. She hurried. Then she went out on the porch and took off her shoes. She liked to lie on her back.

  There wasn’t any street lamp along there. That was a good thing. It took Doris longer to clean up, and then, besides, she had to nurse her baby and get it to sleep. It was lucky it was a healthy kid and slept well. It was like Doris. It was naturally strong. Doris spoke to Grace about her mother-in-law. She always called her “Mrs. Hoffman.” She said, “Mrs. Hoffman’s worse to-day,” or, “she’s better,” or, “she bled a little.”

  She didn’t like to put her baby in the front room of the four-room house, where all four of the Hoffmans ate and sat on Sundays and where Mrs. Hoffman lay when she lay down, but she didn’t want Mrs. Hoffman to know that she didn’t want that. It would hurt her feelings. Ed had built his mother a kind of low couch to lie on. He was handy. She could lie down easily and get up easily. Doris didn’t like to put her baby in there. She was afraid the baby would get it. She told Grace that. “I’m afraid all the time he’ll get it,” she told Grace. She put her baby, after it was nursed and ready to go to sleep, in the bed where she and Ed slept, in another room. Ed had been sleeping, during the day, in the same bed, but when he got up in the afternoon he made the bed up fresh for Doris. Ed was that way. He was nice that way.

  Ed was almost like a girl in some things.

  Doris had big breasts but Grace hadn’t hardly any at all. That might have been because Doris had had a kid. No, it wasn’t. She had big breasts before that, before she ever even got married.

  Doris went out to Grace nights. In the mill she and Grace worked in the same big light long spinning-room between the rows of bobbins. They ran up and down or walked up and down or stopped a minute to talk. When you work with some one that way all day every day, you can’t help getting to like her. You get to love her. It’s like being married almost. You know when she is tired because you are tired. If your feet ache you know hers do. You can’t tell, just walking through a place and seeing people working, like Doris and Grace did. You don’t know. You don’t feel it.

  There was a man came through the spinning-room in the middle of the morning and in the middle of the afternoon selling things. They let him. He sold a big chunk of soft candy, called “Milky Way,” and he sold Coca Cola. They let him. You blew in ten cents. It hurt to blow it in but you did. You got the habit and you did. It braced you. Grace could hardly wait when she was working. She wanted her “Milky Way,” she wanted her coke. She was laid off by the time she and Doris and Fanny and Nell went to the fair. There were hard times. A lot were laid off.

  They always took the weaker ones, of course. They knew all right. They didn’t say to a girl, “Do you need it?” They said, “We won’t need you now for a while.” Grace needed it, but not as badly as some. She had Tom Musgrave and her mother working.

  So they had laid her off. It was tight times, not flush times. It was harder work. They made Doris’ side longer. They’d be laying off Ed next. It was hard enough without that.

  They had cut Ed’s pay and Tom Musgrave’s and his mother’s pay.

  They charged just as much for house rent and everything. You had to pay just about as much for things. They said you didn’t but you did. There was a little flame of anger always in Doris at about the time she went to the fair with Grace and Fanny and Nell. She went most of all because she wanted Grace to go and have some fun and forget it and get it off her mind. Grace wouldn’t have gone if Doris hadn’t gone. She would go anywhere Doris did. They hadn’t laid Nell and Fanny off yet.

  When Doris went out to Grace, when they were both working yet, before the tight times came so bad, before they made Doris’ side so much longer and gave Ed and Tom and Ma Musgrave so many more looms... Ed said it kept him on the jump now so he couldn’t think... he said it tired him out worse than ever keeping up; and he looked it... Doris herself kept up by working, she said, almost twice as fast... before all that happened, in the good times yet, she used to go out like that to Grace at night.

  Grace was so tired, lying on the porch. Particularly on hot nights she was so tired. There would maybe be some people, just mill people like themselves, in the mill village street, but not many. There wasn’t any street lamp right near the Musgrave-Hoffman house.

  They could lie in darkness beside each other. Grace was like Ed, Doris’ husband. She hardly ever spoke in the daytime but at night, when it was all dark and hot she would talk. Ed was that way. Grace wasn’t like Doris, raised in a mill town. She and her brother Tom and her pa and ma had been raised on a farm in the North Georgia hills. It wasn’t much of a farm, Grace said. You could hardly raise a thing, Grace said, but it was nice. She said they would have stayed there maybe, only her father died. They owed some money and the farm had to be sold and Tom couldn’t get work; so they came to Langdon.

  There was a kind of waterfall near their farm when they had a farm. It wasn’t exactly a waterfall, Grace said. This would be at night, before Grace got laid off, when she was so tired at night and was lying on the porch. Doris would come to her and would sit down by her or lie down and would not talk loud but whisper.

  Grace would have her shoes off. She would have her dress open wide all down the neck. “Take your stockings off, Grace,” Doris would whisper.

  There was a fair. It was in October, 1930. The mill closed at noon. Doris’ husband was lying down at home. She had left her baby with her mother-in-law. She saw things, a-plenty. There was the ferris wheel and a long street-like place with banners up and pictures on... a fat woman and a woman with snakes around her neck and a two-headed man and a woman in a tree with fuzzy hair and, Nell said, “God knows what else,” and a man on a box, talking about it all. There were some girls in tights, not very clean. They and the men all yelled together, “Yea, yea, yea,” to get the people to come.

  There were niggers there a-plenty, it seemed, town niggers and country niggers, thousands of them, it seemed.

  There were country people a-plenty, white people. They had come mostly in rickety wagons drawn by mules. The fair had been going on all week, but Saturday was the big day. In the big field, where the fair was held, the grass was all worn away. All that part of Georgia, when there wasn’t any grass, was red. It was as red as blood. Ordinarily that place, away out there, nearly a mile from Langdon’s main street, a mile and a half, no less, from the Langdon cotton-mill village, where Doris, Nell, Grace and Fanny all worked and lived, was filled with tall weeds and grass. Whoever owned it couldn’t plant cotton on it because, when the river came up, it got flooded. It might get flooded any time after rains in the hills north of Langdon.

  The ground was rich. Weeds and grass grew tall and thick there. Whoever owned the ground had rented it to the fair people. They came in trucks to bring the fair there. There was a night show and a day show.

  You didn’t pay anything to get in. There was a free baseball game on the day when Doris went to the fair with Nell and Grace and Fanny and there was to be a free show by performers on a platform in the middle of the fair. Doris felt a little guilty going when her husband Ed couldn’t go, didn’t feel like it, but he had kept on saying, “Go on, Doris, GO with the girls. Go on with the girls.”

  Fanny and Nell kept saying, “Ah, come on.” Grace didn’t say anything. She never did.

  Doris f
elt motherly toward Grace. Grace was always so tired after a day in the mill. After a day in the mill, when night came, Grace said, “I’m so tired.” She had dark circles under her eyes. Doris’ husband, Ed Hoffman, worked in the mill nights... a pretty smart man but not strong.

  So, on ordinary nights, when Doris came home from the mill and when her husband Ed had gone to work, he worked nights and she worked days, so they were only together on Saturday afternoons and nights and Sunday and Sunday night until twelve... they usually went to church on Sunday nights, taking Ed’s mother with them... she’d go to church when she couldn’t get up strength to go anywhere else....

  On just ordinary nights, when the long day in the mill was at an end, when Doris had done what housework at home there was left to do and had nursed the baby and it had gone to sleep and her mother-in-law was lying down, she went outside. The mother-in-law got the supper for Ed and then he left and Doris came and ate and there were the dishes to do. “You’re tired,” the mother-in-law said, “I’ll do them.”

  “No you won’t,” Doris said. She had a way of saying things so people minded what she said. They did what she told them to do.

  There would be Grace waiting for Doris outside. She would be lying on the porch if it was a hot night.

  The Hoffman house wasn’t really the Hoffman house at all. It was a mill-village house. It was a double house. There were forty houses just like it in that street in the mill village. Doris and Ed and Ed’s mother, Ma Hoffman, who had tuberculosis and couldn’t work any more, lived on one side and Grace Musgrave and her brother Tom and their mother, Ma Musgrave, lived on the other. Tom wasn’t married. There was just a thin wall between them. There were two front doors but there was just one porch, a narrow one running clear across the front of the house. Tom Musgrave and Ma Musgrave, like Ed, worked nights. Grace was alone in her side of the house at night. She wasn’t afraid. She said to Doris, “I’m not afraid. You’re so near.” Ma Musgrave got the supper in that house and then she and Tom Musgrave left. They left enough for Grace. She washed the dishes like Doris did. They left at the same time Ed Hoffman did. They went together.

  You had to go in time to check in and get ready. When you worked days you had to stay right on the job until quitting time and then clean up. Doris and Grace both worked in the spinning-room at the mill and Ed and Tom Musgrave were loom-fixers. Ma Musgrave was a weaver.

  At night, when Doris had got her work done and had nursed her kid and it had gone to sleep and Grace had her work done Doris went out to Grace. Grace was one of the kind that will work and work and won’t give up, and so was Doris.

  Only Grace wasn’t strong like Doris. She was frail and had black hair and dark brown eyes that looked unnaturally big in her thin small face and she had a small mouth. Doris had a big mouth and nose and a big head. Her body was long but her legs were short. They were strong though. Grace’s legs were round and nice. They were like a man likes a girl’s legs to be and she had pretty small feet but they weren’t strong. They couldn’t stand the racket. “I don’t wonder,” Doris said, “they’re so little and so pretty.” After a day in the mill... on your feet all day, running up and down a body’s feet hurt. Doris’ feet smarted but not like Grace’s. “They hurt so,” Grace said. She always meant her feet when she said that. “Take off your stockings.”

  “No, you wait. I’ll take them off for you.”

  Doris took them off for Grace.

  “Now you lie still.”

  She’d rub Grace all over. She didn’t exactly feel her. Every one said that knew that Doris had good rubbing hands. She had strong quick hands. They were alive hands. What she did to Grace she did also to Ed, her husband, when he was off on Saturday night and they slept together. He needed it all right. She rubbed Grace’s feet and her legs and her shoulders and her neck and everywhere. She began at the top and then began at the bottom. “Now turn over,” she said. She rubbed her back a long time. She did that to Ed too. It was nice, she thought, to feel people and to rub them, hard but not too hard.

  It was nice if the people you rubbed were nice. Grace was nice and Ed Hoffman was nice. They didn’t feel the same. “I guess no two people’s bodies feel the same,” Grace thought. Grace’s body was softer, not so stringy as Ed’s.

  You rubbed her awhile and then she talked. She began talking. Ed always began talking when Doris rubbed him that way. They didn’t talk about the same things. Ed was a man of ideas. He could read and write and Doris and Grace couldn’t. When he had time to read he read both newspapers and books. Grace couldn’t read or write any more than Doris could. They hadn’t been brought up to it. Ed had wanted to be a preacher but he hadn’t made it. He’d have made it if he hadn’t been so shy he couldn’t stand up before people and talk.

  If his father had lived he might have got up nerve and made it. His father, when he was alive, wanted him to. He saved and sent him to school. Doris could write her name and could spell out a few words if she tried but Grace couldn’t do even that much. When Doris rubbed Ed with her strong hands that never did seem to get tired, he talked of ideas. He had got it into his head he would like to be a man to get up a union.

  He had got it into his head mill people might get up a union and strike. He talked about it. Sometimes, when Doris had been rubbing him a long time he got to laughing and laughed at himself.

  He said, “I talk about myself getting up a union.” Once, before Doris knew him, he had worked at a mill in another town where they had a union. They had a strike too and got licked. Ed said he didn’t care. He said it was good times. He was just a young kid then. That was before Doris met and married him, before he came to Langdon. His father was alive then. He laughed and said, “I got ideas but no nerve. I’d like to get up a union here and I ain’t got the nerve.” He laughed at himself that way.

  Grace, when Doris rubbed her at night when Grace was so tired, when her body began to feel softer and softer, nicer and nicer under Doris’ hands, she never did talk about ideas.

  She liked to describe places. There was a little waterfall, in a little creek, with some bushes, near the farm where she lived before her father died and she and her brother Tom and her mother moved to Langdon and got to be mill people. There wasn’t just one waterfall, a big one. There was one over rocks and then another and another and another. There was coolness, a shady place with rocks and bushes. There was water, Grace said, acting as though it was alive. It seemed to whisper and then it talked, she said. If you went a little way it was like horses trotting. There was a little pool beneath each fall, she said.

  She used to go there when she was a child. There were fish in the pools but if you kept still, after awhile, they paid no attention. Grace’s father died when she and her brother Tom were children yet, but they didn’t have to sell the farm right away, not for a year or two; so they went there all the time.

  It was near their house.

  It was wonderful to hear Grace talk of it. Doris thought that on a hot night, when she was tired herself and her own feet smarted, it was the nicest thing she ever knew. In the hot cotton-mill town, in Georgia, where the nights are so still and hot, when Doris had got her baby to sleep at last and had rubbed Grace and had rubbed her, until Grace said the tiredness had all gone out of her feet and her arms and her legs and the smarting and the tenseness and all...

  You’d never have thought that Grace’s brother, Tom Musgrave, who was such a homely tall-like man and had never married and whose teeth were all so black and who had such a big Adam’s apple... you’d never have thought a man like that, when he was a small boy, would have been so nice to his little sister.

  Taking her to pools and waterfalls and fishing.

  He was so homely you’d never have thought he could be Grace’s brother at all.

  You’d never have thought a girl like Grace, who was always getting tired so easily and who was ordinarily so silent and who was always looking, when she had her job in the mill yet, as though she was going to faint or something
— you’d never have thought, when you rubbed her and rubbed her, as Doris did, so patiently and nice, liking to, you’d never have thought she could talk as she did about places and things.

  2

  THE FAIR AT Langdon, Georgia, fed Doris Hoffman’s consciousness of worlds outside her own mill-bound world. That was a world of Grace and Ed and Mrs. Hoffman and Nell and thread being made and flying machinery and wages and talk of the new stretch-out system that had been put in at the mill and always wages and hours and things like that. It wasn’t varied enough. It was too much always the same. Doris couldn’t read. The fair was something to tell Ed about afterwards at night in bed. It was nice also for Grace to go. She didn’t seem to get so tired. The fair was crowded and your shoes got dusty and the shows were shabby and noisy but Doris didn’t know that.

  The shows and the merry-go-round and the ferris wheel came from some far outside world. There were show people shouting in front of tents and girls in tights who maybe never had been in any mill but had traveled everywhere. There were men selling jewelry, sharp-eyed men who had the nerve to say anything to a body. Perhaps they and the shows had been up North and out West, where the cowboys were and on Broadway in New York and everywhere. Doris knew about all of these things because she had been to the movies quite a lot.

  Being just a mill hand, born one, was like being always a prisoner. You couldn’t get out of knowing that. You were housed in, shut up. People, outside people, not mill hands, thought you were different. They looked down on you. They couldn’t help it. They couldn’t know how you got sometimes, wanting to explode, hating every one and everything. When you got that way you had to hold on tight and shut up. It was the best way.