Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  There was confusion. Molly had gone away from Red that evening, down along the wood road, half overgrown with laurels, driving the cow toward the house. There was a little log barn near the mountain house into which the cow was to be driven to be milked. Both the house and the barn were directly on the road in which earlier Red had been walking. The cow had a young calf that was being kept in a railed enclosure near the barn.

  Red Oliver had thought that Molly had nice eyes. When she had been talking to him up there that evening, giving him directions, he had been thinking of another woman, of Ethel Long. It might have been because they were both tall and slender. There had always been something a little tricky about Ethel Long’s eyes. They grew warm and then suddenly they were strangely cold. The new woman was like Ethel Long, but at the same time unlike.

  “Women. Women,” Red thought, a little contemptuously. He wanted to be off women. He didn’t want to think of women. The woman in the woods had told him to stay where he was in the woods. “I’ll get you some supper after awhile,” she said to him, speaking softly, shyly. “Then I’ll take you on to Birchfield. I’m going there when it’s dark. I’m one of the strikers. I’ll take you a safe way.”

  The cow had a young calf in a fenced-in enclosure near the barn. She ran down the wood road. She bawled loudly. When Molly had let her through an opening in the fence she ran bawling toward the calf and the calf was also excited. It also bawled. It ran up and down on one side of a fenced enclosure and the cow ran up and down on the other and the woman ran to let the cow in to her calf. There was an impulse in the cow to give and there was crying hunger in the calf. They both wanted to tear down the fence that separated them and the woman let the cow in to the calf and stood watching. Red Oliver saw all of this because he hadn’t listened to the woman’s instructions about staying in the woods, but had followed her closely. There it was. She was a woman who had looked at him with kindness in her eyes, and he wanted to be near her. He was like most American men. There was hidden away in him a hope, half a conviction, that in some way, some day, he might find a woman who would save him from himself.

  Red Oliver followed the woman and the half-frantic cow down the hill and through the wood into the farmyard. She let the cow into the enclosure with her calf. He wanted to get near her, to see everything, to be near her.

  “She is a woman. Wait. What? She might love me. That may be all that is the matter with me. After all I may need only the love of some woman to make my manhood real to me.

  “Live in love — in a woman. Go into her and come out refreshed. Raise children. Build a home.

  “Now you see. There it is. Now you have something to live for. Now you can cheat, scheme, get on, rise in the world. Now, you see, you are not doing it for yourself alone. You are doing it for these others. You are okay.”

  There was a little stream running along the edge of the barnyard and bushes grew along the stream. Red went along the creek stepping on stones dimly seen. It was dark under the bushes. Occasionally he stepped into the water. His feet got wet. He didn’t mind.

  He saw the cow hurry to its calf and had got so close that he could see the woman standing and watching as the calf sucked. That, the scene there, the quiet barnyard, the woman standing there watching as a calf sucked a cow — the earth, smell of earth and water and bushes... now flaming with fall colors about Red... impulses that drove a man in life came and went in a man... it would be nice, for example, to be a simple farm man, isolated from others, perhaps not thinking of others... even though you were always poor... what did poverty matter?... Ethel Long... something he had wanted from her and hadn’t got.

  .. O man, hoping, dreaming.

  .. Always thinking, somewhere there is a golden key... “some one has it... give it to me....”

  When she thought the calf had enough she drove the cow out of the little enclosure and into the barn. The cow was quiet and content now. She fed the cow and went to the house.

  Red wanted to get nearer. Already there were vague thoughts in his head. “If this woman... perhaps... how can a man tell?” The strange woman, Molly, might be the one.

  To find love is also a part of youth. Some woman, a strong woman, will suddenly see in me something... hidden manhood I can’t yet see or feel myself. She will come suddenly toward me. Open arms.

  “Something like that might give me courage.” Already she thought he was a certain thing. She thought he was a reckless, a daring young communist. Suppose, through her, he suddenly became something. Love with such a one might be the thing he needed, something splendid. She had left the cow and had gone for a moment to the house and he came out of the bushes and ran through the soft darkness into the barn. He looked quickly about. There was a little loft, filled with hay, above the cow and it had an opening through which he could look down. He could stay up there quietly and watch her milk the cow. There was another opening looking out into the yard. The house was near — not more than twenty yards away.

  The cow in the barn was content and quiet. The woman had fed her. Although it was late fall, the night was not cold. Red could see through the opening in the loft the stars coming out in the sky. He took a pair of dry stockings out of his bag and put them on. Again he had been visited by the feeling that was always coming to him. It was the feeling that had led him into a confused affair with Ethel Long. It annoyed him. There he was again near a woman and that fact had excited him. “Can’t I ever be near a woman without feeling like this?” he asked himself. Little angry thoughts came.

  It was always the same thing. He wanted and couldn’t get. If he once got, fully, his whole being merged with another... the birth of new life... something to strengthen him... would he be then a man at last? He was lying at that moment quietly in the hayloft remembering sharply other times he had felt as he did then. It had resulted always in his selling himself out.

  He was again a boy at home walking on a railroad track. Down along the river, below the town, at Langdon, Georgia, quite removed from the life of the town as was the mill village by the cotton mill, some poor little wooden shacks had been built. Some of the shacks had been made of boards fished out of the stream during floods. They were roofed with tin cans flattened out and made to serve as shingles. Tough people lived down there. The people living down there were outlaws, squatters, tough desperate people out of the poor white class of the South. They were people who made cheap whisky to sell to Negroes. They were chicken thieves. There was a girl who lived down there, red-headed as he was. Red had first seen her one day in town, on the main street of Langdon when he was a schoolboy.

  She had looked at him in just a certain way. “What?

  Do you mean it?” People of that sort? Young girls coming out of that sort of families. He remembered his surprise at her daring, her boldness. Just the same it was pleasant. It was nice.

  There was a hungry look in her eyes. He couldn’t have been mistaken. “Hello, come on,” the eyes said. He had followed her along the street, a mere boy, afraid, ashamed, keeping far back of her, stopping in doorways, pretending he was not following.

  Just the same she had known. She may have wanted to tease him. She played with him. How bold she was. She was a little thing, rather pretty but not very clean-looking. Her dress was dirty and torn and her face covered with freckles. She had on an old pair of shoes, too large for her, and no stockings.

  He had spent nights thinking of her and dreaming of her, of that girl. He hadn’t wanted to. He went to walk down along the railroad tracks, past where he knew she lived, in one of the poor little shacks. He pretended he was down there to fish in the yellow river that ran below Langdon. He didn’t want to fish. He wanted to be near her. He had followed her. That first day he had followed, keeping far back, half hoping she didn’t know. He had found out about her and her family. He had heard some men speaking of her father on Main Street. The father had got arrested for stealing chickens. He was one of the men who sold cheap bootleg whisky to Negroes. Such men ought to be wiped
out. They and their families ought to be driven out of town. Just the same Red had wanted her, had dreamed of her. He walked down that way, pretending he was going fishing. Was she laughing at him? Anyway he never got a chance at her, never even spoke to her. It might have been that all the time she was just laughing at him. Even little girls were that way sometimes. He had found that out.

  And if he had got a chance at her he knew, in his heart, that he wouldn’t have had the nerve.

  Afterwards, when he was already a young man, when he was in the North at college, there had come another time.

  He went with three others — college boys like himself — after a ball game, to a house of prostitution. That was in Boston. They had been playing a game of baseball with another New England college team and returned through Boston. It was the end of the baseball season and they celebrated. They drank and went to the place that one of the young men knew about. He had been there before. The others took women. They went upstairs to the rooms in the house with women. Red didn’t go. He pretended he didn’t want to and so he sat downstairs in what was called the parlor of the house. It was “a parlor house.” They are going out of style. There were several women in there, sitting in there, waiting to serve men. It was their job to serve men.

  There was a fat middle-aged man who looked to Red like a business man. That was odd. Had he already, at that time, begun to have contempt for the idea of a man spending his life buying and selling? The man in that house that day was like the traveling salesman he afterwards frightened in the road near Birchfield. The man was half asleep, sitting in a chair in the parlor of the house. Red thought he would never forget the man’s face... its ugliness at just that moment.

  He remembered afterwards — thinking... did he have the thoughts at the moment or did they come later?... “Never mind,” he thought... “I wouldn’t mind seeing a man drunk if I could feel the man drunk as drunk, trying to establish something. There might be drunkenness in a man... a man might get drunk trying to establish a dream in himself. He might even be trying to go toward something thus. If he were drunk that way, I bet I would know it.”

  There is another sort of drunkenness. “It is disintegration... of personality, I guess. Something slips... falls away... everything becomes loose. I don’t like it. I hate it.” Red’s own face, sitting in that house that time, might have been ugly too. He bought drinks, spent money he couldn’t afford to spend — recklessly.

  He lied. “I don’t want to,” he had said it to the others. It was a lie.

  There it is. You dream of a thing as being the most lovely thing that can happen in life. It can be as ugly as hell too. After you do it, you hate the one you did it with. Hate comes flooding in.

  Sometimes though you want to be ugly — like a dog rolling in offal... or perhaps like a rich man rolling in his wealth.

  The others said to Red, “Don’t you want to?”

  “No,” he said. He lied. The others laughed at him a little and he kept on lying to himself. They thought he hadn’t the nerve... which was anyway pretty near the truth. They were right. Afterwards, when they had got out of there, when they were outside that house in the street... they had gone to the place in the early evening while it was still daylight... when they came out, the lights in the street were lighted.

  Children were playing in the street. Red kept being glad he hadn’t but was, at the same time, deep down in what he thought was some ugly corner in himself, sorry he hadn’t.

  Then he began feeling virtuous. That wasn’t a nice feeling either. It was an ugly feeling. “I think I am better than they are.” There were so many such women as the ones in that house — the world was teeming with them.

  Oldest trade in the world.

  Jesus Maria! Red just went along silently with the others through a lighted street. The world in which he walked seemed queer and strange to him. It was as though the houses along the street were not real houses, the people along the street, even some children he saw running and shouting, weren’t real. They were figures on a stage — unreal. The houses and buildings he saw were made of cardboard.

  AND SO Red had got a reputation for being a nice boy... a clean boy... a nice young man.

  .. A good ball player... pretty keen in his studies.

  “You watch that young man. He’s all right. He’s clean. He’s all right.”

  Red had liked it. He hated it. “If they only knew the truth,” he thought.

  For example, in that other place into which he had got, in the barn that night.. that woman who had found him in the woods... an impulse in her to save him... to whom he had lied, saying he was a communist.

  She came out of the house bringing a lantern with her. She milked the cow. The cow was quiet now. It was eating some sort of soft mash she had put into a box. Red was lying by an opening that looked down and she heard him moving in the hay. “It’s all right,” he said to her. “I came in here. I’m up here.” His voice had got strangely husky. He had to make an effort to control it. “Keep quiet,” she said.

  She sat by the cow’s flanks to milk. She sat on a little stool and as he had got his face to the opening above he could see her, could watch her movements in the light of the lantern. So close to one again. So far from her. He couldn’t help making her, in imagination at least, really close to himself. He saw her hands on the udders of the cow. Milk came down, making a sharp sound against the sides of a tin pail held between her knees. Her hands seen thus, in the circle of light down below, made by the lantern... they were strong alive workingwoman’s hands... there was a little circle of light... the hands gripping teats — milk coming... the strong sweet smell of the milk, of animal life in the barn — barn smells. The hay on which he was lying — darkness and the circle of light down there... her hands. Jesus Maria!

  Shame too. There it was. There was the little circle of light in the darkness down below. Once, while she was milking, her mother — a little bent white-haired old woman — came to the door of the barn and said a few words to her daughter. She went away. She was speaking of a lunch she was putting up. It was for Red. He knew that.

  He knew the mother didn’t know, but just the same these people were being sweet and kind to him. The daughter was wanting to protect him, to take care of him. She would have made up some kind of excuse for wanting to carry the lunch when she left the farm later that evening to return to Birchfield. The mother wouldn’t ask too many questions. The mother had gone to the house.

  A soft circle of light down there in the barn. Circle of light about a woman’s form... her hands... the swelling of her breast — firm and round... her hands milking the cow... warm nice milk... swift thoughts in Red....

  He was close to her, to a woman. He was very near her. Once or twice she turned her face up toward him but she could not see him in the darkness above. When she turned her face up thus, it — the face — was still in the circle of light but her hair was in darkness. She had lips like Ethel Long’s lips and more than once he had kissed Ethel’s lips. Now Ethel was another man’s woman. “Suppose, after all, that is all I want... all any man really wants... this restlessness in me that has driven me from home, made a tramp of me, made a wanderer of me.

  “How do I know that I give a damn for people in general, the generality of people... their suffering... it may be all bunk?”

  She didn’t speak to him again until she had finished milking, when she stood under him, whispering up, giving him instructions about getting out of the barn. He was to wait for her by a little corncrib near the road. It was fortunate the family didn’t keep a dog.

  It was all nothing, except to Red... his attempt at progress with himself... to understand something if he could... an impulse, a feeling, that went on all the time he was walking with her... behind her... in front of her, in the narrow path, going up over a mountain, down into a hollow... now beside a stream, going toward Birchfield in the dark. It was strongest in him when he stopped at one place along the way to eat the food she had brought... in
a little opening near tall trees... quite dark... thinking of her just as a woman... who might possibly have, if he had dared try... to satisfy something in himself... as though doing that would give him something he so much wanted... his manhood... was that it? He even argued with himself— “What the hell? Suppose, when I was with those other women in that house in Boston... if I had, would that have given me my manhood?

  “Or if I had got that little girl, in Langdon, long ago?”

  He had, after all, had a woman once. He had had Ethel Long. “Well!”

  He had got nothing very permanent from that.

  “It isn’t that. I wouldn’t do it even if I could,” he said to himself. It was time now for men to prove themselves in a new way.

  Just the same — all the time he was with the woman — he was as the foreman in the mill had been with Molly Seabright. In the darkness, on the way to Birchfield that night, he had kept wanting to touch her with his hands, touch her body with his body, as the foreman in the mill had done. Perhaps she didn’t know. He hoped she didn’t. When they had got near the communist camp in the wood — near the clearing where the tents and shacks had been put up — he had asked her not to tell the communist leaders about his presence in the camp.