Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  It had been late on a Sunday afternoon when she had first seen Red. She thought at once that he was something he wasn’t.

  A communist.

  She had gone into a wood above the house late on the Sunday afternoon to get the family cow. To get it she had to go through the wood to where there was an upland pasture. She had gone there. She got the cow and had come out along an over-grown lumber road in the wood to where she saw Red. He must have come into the wood after she passed through the first time and before she returned. He was sitting on a log in a little open place. When he saw her he got up and stood facing her.

  She wasn’t frightened.

  A thought came to her swiftly. “You ain’t that fellow they air looking for, air you?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “The law — the law was here. You ain’t that communist they air looking for?”

  She had an instinct which Red had already found out was common to most poor people in America. The law in America was something that could be depended upon to be unfair to the poor. You had to look out for the law. If you were poor, it got you. It lied about you. If you were in trouble, it bullied you. The law was your enemy.

  Red hadn’t answered the woman for a moment. He had to think fast. What had she meant? “Be you the communist?” she said again, anxiously. “The law’s been looking for you.”

  Why had he answered as he did?

  “Communist?” he asked again, looking sharply at her.

  And then suddenly — in a flash — he had got it, he understood. He had taken a quick resolution.

  “It was that man,” he thought. A traveling salesman had given him a lift that afternoon along the road toward Birchfield and something had happened.

  There had been talk. The traveling man had begun talking about the communists who were leading the strike at Birchfield and as Red had listened he had suddenly grown angry.

  The man in the car was a fat man, a salesman. He had picked Red up in the road. He talked loosely, cursing the communist who had dared to come into a Southern town and lead a strike. They were all of them, he said, dirty snakes who should be hung up to the nearest tree. They wanted to put Negroes on the same basis as the whites. The fat traveling man was such a man, talking loosely, cursing as he talked.

  Before he had got onto the subject of the communist, he had been boasting. Perhaps he had picked Red up to have some one to whom to boast. On the night before, on the Saturday night just past, he had been, he said, at another town back along the road, some fifty miles back — another industrial town, a mill town, and he had got drunk with a man there. He and a man of the town had got themselves two women. They were married women, he boasted. The husband of the one he had been with was a clerk in a store. The man had to work late on the Saturday night. He couldn’t watch his wife and so the salesman and a man he knew in the town had got her and another woman into a car and had driven into the country. The man he had been with was, he said, a merchant of the town. They had managed to get the women half drunk. The salesman had gone on bragging to Red... he said he had got the woman... she had tried to put him off but he had got her into a room and had closed the door... he had made her come across.... “They can’t fool with me,” he said... and then suddenly he had begun cursing the communists who were leading the strike at Birchfield. “They are just cattle,” he said. “They’ve got their nerve coming into the South. We’ll fix ’em,” he said. He had gone on talking thus, and then suddenly he had grown suspicious of Red. It might have been Red’s eyes that had betrayed him. “Say,” the man cried suddenly... they were traveling at that moment on a paved road and were drawing near the town of Birchfield... the road was deserted... “say,” said the salesman, suddenly stopping the car. Red had begun to hate the man. He didn’t care what happened. His eyes had betrayed him. The man in the car had asked the same question later asked by the woman with the cow in the wood.

  “You ain’t one of them fellows, are you?”

  “Ain’t what?”

  “One of them damn communists.”

  “Yes.” Red had said it calmly, quietly enough.

  A sudden impulse had come to him. It would be great fun frightening the fat salesman in the car. In trying to stop the car suddenly he had almost driven it into a ditch. His hands began to tremble violently.

  He sat there in the car, his fat hands on the steering wheel, staring at Red.

  “What, you ain’t one of them... you’re fooling.” Red looked hard at him. There were little flecks of white spittle gathering on the man’s lips. The lips were thick. Red had an almost uncontrollable desire to hit the man in the face with his fist. The man’s fright grew. After all Red was young and strong.

  “What? What?” The words came tremblingly and jerkily from the man’s lips.

  “You air?”

  “Yes,” Red had said again.

  He had got slowly out of the car. The man, he knew, would not dare order him out. He was carrying a small worn hand-bag with a rope to be thrown over his shoulder when he was traveling the road and it had been sitting on his knees. The fat man in the car was pale now. His hands fumbled about, trying to start the car quickly. It started with a jerk, ran two or three feet and then stopped. In his excitement, he had killed the engine. The car hung on the edge of the ditch.

  Then he had got the car started and Red, standing at the road’s edge... an impulse had come to him. He had a passionate desire to frighten the man still more. There was a stone lying beside the road, a rather large stone, and he picked it up and dropping the bag ran toward the man in the car. “Look out,” he yelled. His voice rang across the nearby fields and along the empty road. The man had managed to drive off, the car running crazily from one side of the road to the other. It disappeared over a hill.

  “And so,” Red thought, standing in the woods with a factory woman— “and so, it was him, that fellow.” Since he had left the man in the car he had been wandering rather aimlessly for two or three hours along a sandy country road at the foot of a mountain. He had left the main road into Birchfield after the traveling salesman drove away and had gone into the side road. He remembered suddenly that there had been a small unpainted house at the place where the side road he had been following left the main road. A country woman, some poor white tenant farmer’s wife, had been sitting barefooted on a little porch before the house. The man he had frightened in the road would have driven on into Birchfield, crossing the bridge before the communist camp. He would have reported the incident to the police. “God only knows what kind of a tale he would tell,” Red thought. “I bet he would make himself out some kind of hero. He would brag.”

  “And so” — as he had been loitering in a country road... the road followed the windings of a small stream, crossing and re-crossing it... he had been excited by the incident in the road, but the excitement had gradually passed... to be sure he had never meant to hit the man in the car with the stone... “and so.”

  Just the same he had hated the man with a sudden furious hatred new to him. He had been exhausted afterwards, a queer kind of emotional cyclone had run through him, leaving him, like the salesman in the car, weak and trembling.

  He had left the little road he was following and had gone into a wood, loitering there for perhaps an hour, lying on his back under a tree and afterwards he had found a deep place in the creek, in a field of laurel bushes, and taking off his clothes had bathed in the cold water.

  Then he had put on a clean shirt and had gone along the road and had climbed up a hillside into the wood where the woman with the cow had found him. The incident in the road had happened at about three. It might have been five or six when the woman came upon him. It was getting late in the year now and darkness came early, and all that time, while he had been loitering along, going into the woods, finding the place to bathe, officers of the law had been out after him. They would have found out from the woman at the cross-roads which way he had gone. They would have gone inquiring along the way. They would h
ave been inquiring for him — for a crazy communist gone suddenly berserk — a man who attacked respectable citizens on the highway, a man gone suddenly dangerous and like a mad dog. The officers, “the law,” as the woman in the woods called them, would have had a story to tell. He, Red, had attacked a man who was giving him a ride. “What do you think of that?” A respectable traveling salesman, who had picked him up in the road. He had tried to kill the man.

  Red in his place near the communist camp suddenly remembered standing later with the woman who was driving the cow in the wood and looking at her in the dim light of evening. When he had been bathing in the creek he had heard voices in the nearby road. The place he had found to bathe was quite near the road, but there was a laurel thicket between the creek and the road. He was half dressed, but had dropped to the ground to let the car pass. The men in the car were talking. “Keep your gun in your hand. He may be hiding along here. He is a dangerous son-of-a-bitch,” he had heard a man’s voice declaring. He hadn’t connected the incident with himself. It was lucky the men hadn’t come into the thicket to search. “They would have shot me like a dog.” It was a new feeling for Red — this being a hunted man. When the woman with the cow told him that the law had just been to the house where she lived and had asked whether such a man as himself had been seen about, Red suddenly trembled with fright. The officers hadn’t known that she was one of the strikers at the mill at Birchfield, that she was herself now called a communist... these poor workers in a cotton mill had suddenly become dangerous people. “The law” had thought she was a farm woman.

  The officers had driven up to the house and had called in loud voices and the woman was just leaving the house to go up the hill to get the cow. “Have you seen so and so?” gruff voices demanded. “There’s a red-headed son-of-a-bitch of a communist loose somewhere around in this country. He tried to kill a man back on the highway. He wanted to kill him and get his car, I guess. He’s a dangerous man.”

  The woman to whom they were talking had lost some of her country-woman’s fear and respect for the law. She had had experience. Since the strike led by the communists had broken out in Birchfield there had been several riots. Red had seen accounts of them in the Southern newspapers. He already knew from his experience at Langdon, Georgia, during the strike there — the experience that had sent him out of Langdon, wandering for the time being on the road, upset, really trying to straighten himself out, get his own mind straight as to what he felt about the growing labor difficulties in the South and all over America, ashamed of what had happened to himself during a strike in Langdon... he had already found out something of what workers on strike came to feel about the law and about accounts of strikes published in newspapers.

  They felt that, whatever happened, lies would be told. Their own story would not be rightly told. They had learned that they could depend upon the newspapers to give the news a twist in favor of the employers. At Birchheld there had been attempts at parades broken up, attempts to hold meetings broken up. Because the leaders of the strike at Birchfield had been communists, the whole community had been up in arms. The bitter feeling between the people of the town and the strikers had grown as the strike went on.

  Crowds of deputy sheriffs, sworn in for the time being, for the most part tough men, some of them imported from the outside, called special detectives, often half drunk, descended upon strike meetings. They bullied and threatened the strikers. Speakers were pulled down from platforms erected for meetings. Men and women were beaten.

  “Smash the damn communists if they resist. Kill them.” A working woman, an ex-farm woman from the hills... no doubt very like the one who had brought Red Oliver to the communists’ camp... had been killed during the strike at Birchfield. The woman Red had got in with had known her, had worked near her in the mill. The newspapers and the citizens of the town of Birchfield hadn’t, she knew, told the true story of what had happened.

  The newspapers had said simply that there was a strike riot and that the woman had been killed. The ex-farm woman who had become Red’s friend knew that. She knew what had happened. There had been no riot.

  The woman who had been killed had been one with a particular talent. She was a song maker. She made up songs about the life of the poor white people, men, women and children who worked in Southern cotton mills and in Southern fields. There were songs she had made up about the machines in cotton mills, about the speed-up in the mills, about women and children getting tuberculosis working in cotton mills. She was like the woman named Doris, Red Oliver had known in the mill at Langdon, and whom he had once heard singing with other mill girls on a Sunday afternoon as he lay in tall weeds by a railroad track. The songmaking woman in the Birchfield mill had also made up songs about the girls going to the water closet in the mill.

  Or like the women in the Langdon mills they were waiting for the hour to come when they could rest a moment during the long mornings and afternoons — to drink Coca-Colas or to eat a kind of candy called “Milky Way.” Lives of such people, caught thus in the trap of life, hung on little moments like that, a woman cheating a little, going into the toilet to rest there, the foreman of the room watching her — trying to catch her cheating.

  Or the woman, a mill worker, squeezing out of her meager pay enough money to buy five cents’ worth of cheap candy.

  Twicet a day.

  Milky Way.

  There were songs like that. No doubt in every mill each group of workers had its song-maker. Little fragments were picked up out of the meager hard lives. The lives were made doubly, a hundred times more pathetic and real, because a woman, a song-maker, being a kind of genius, could make a song out of such fragments. It was going on wherever people were gathered together in groups and were down-trodden. The factories had their songs and the prisons their songs.

  Red had got the story of the death of the song-making woman at Birchfield, not from the newspapers, but from a tramp in a place where he had stopped with another young man near the city of Atlanta. There had been a little grove of trees out of the edge of a town near some railroad yards to which he had gone one day with another young man he had met in a box car. It had happened two or three days after he had fled from Langdon.

  A man there, in that place, a bleary-eyed young man... young yet, but with his face all blotched and broken out, no doubt from drinking cheap moonshine whiskey... the man was talking to several others, also tramps and workingmen out of employment.

  There had been a discussion going on. “You can’t go work at Birchfield,” the bleary-eyed young man said, fiercely. “Yes, God damn it, I was there. They’ll take you on as a scab if you go there,” he said. “I thought I’d do it. By God, I did. I thought I’d go be a scab.”

  The man in the tramps’ hang-out was a bitter, bitten man. He was a drunkard. There he sat in the tramps’ hangout, “the Jungle,” they called it. He hadn’t minded being a scab, scabbing on the strikers at Birchfield. There was, with him, no principle involved. Anyway, he didn’t want to work, he said, laughing unpleasantly. He was simply broke. He wanted something to drink.

  He was describing an experience. “I didn’t have a cent and was dead for the stuff,” he said. “Well, you know. I couldn’t stand it.” It might not have been liquor the man wanted. Red had guessed that. He might have been a dope. The man’s hands were twitching as he sat on the ground in the jungle talking with the other tramps.

  Some one had told him that he could get work at Birchfield and he had gone there. He swore violently telling about it. “Bastard that I am, I couldn’t do it,” he said. He had told the story of the singing woman killed at Birchfield. It had been to Red a simple, a pathetic tale. The woman, the songmaking woman, an ex-farm woman from the hills, now a mill woman, was like the other woman driving the cow who had found Red in the wood. The two women had known each other, had worked near each other in the mill. Red didn’t know about that when he heard the bleary-eyed young man telling the story in the tramps’ jungle.

  That one
, the singing, ballad-making workwoman, had been sent, with several other women and girls... they were standing together on a truck.. they were sent thus through the streets of the town of Birchfield with instructions to stop on crowded street corners and sing their songs. One of the communist leaders had thought out the scheme. He had managed to get for them a truck, a cheap Ford truck owned by one of the men strikers. The communist leaders were alert. They knew the technique of stirring up trouble. The communist leaders thought up schemes to keep the strikers in the strikers’ camp busy.

  “Beware of the enemy, capitalism. Fight him in every possible way. Keep him worried. Frighten him. Remember that you are fighting for the minds of the people, the imaginations of people.”

  The communists, from the point of view of fellows like Red Oliver, were unscrupulous, too. They didn’t seem to mind sending people out to be killed. They were in the South leading a strike. It was a chance for them. They were snatching at it. There was something in them harder, more unscrupulous, more determined... they were something quite different from the old leaders of labor in America.

  Red Oliver had got a look at the old kind of labor leaders. One of them had come to Langdon when the strike had broken out there. He was all for what he called “conferences” with the bosses, talking it over with them. He wanted the strikers to remain peaceful, kept begging them to remain peaceful. He kept talking about labor sitting at the council table with the bosses... “with capitalism,” the communists would have said.

  Talk. Talk.

  Bunk.

  Perhaps it was that. Red didn’t know. He was a man looking into a new world. The world into which he had got himself suddenly plunged, almost by accident, was new and strange to him. It might be, after all, an actual new world, just coming into being in America.