Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Every man with a bottle of moon whiskey in his hip pocket.

  There would be fair, straight-shooting fellows and mean, cheap ones. All would be miserably clad. As a man goes along in life he finds out something very important to this business of living. It is that you can’t go through America, or I dare say any other country, in the way so many of us do, saying, “The Highlanders are so and so, the Southerners, the workers, the rich, the poor, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie so and so,” making these terrible Mason and Dixon line judgments, believing in them.

  Drunken fights — stabbings, and shootings sometimes among the hill men, horse trading — thus, men always lived, horse trading. It was a part of the game being played.

  Kit said, “I don’t care. I think if my father — if he had been born different, in a different place, had got him a different wife—” She was implying that there was something to be said. “If he’d even had the chance I’ve had.”

  She meant to say that the father had a kind of hidden power in him, something dark perhaps (Kit was always asking, demanding, that I leap across great gaps in her account of how things were with her, what she felt about things). The man, her father, was no great talker. He, in some way, bent men to his will.

  “But what about your mother, Kit? Why didn’t he bend her?

  “You say the house was always — unless you swept it, cleaned it — that it was always dirty and that the dress she wore was dirty.

  “Why didn’t he take her in hand?”

  “Oh, I guess it was because he didn’t give a damn for the house or her,” Kit said. She had always the times of falling into easy profanity. She went smiling off into one of her side talks, away from her own story, speaking of the great numbers of people there were in the world you had to just let go to hell, she said, not counting on them, using them when and where you could. She had got, out of her living, a philosophy common enough to a certain kind of Americans, for the most part the successful ones. More than once during my acquaintance with her I thought of Kit that she might, under other circumstances, have been one of our successful ones, another Rockefeller, a Harriman, a Gould.

  “There are all kinds,” she said. “You must know that! I should be telling you!

  “You scare the bastards, or you bluff them out or, if you can use them in your business, you wheedle them or soft-soap them along.”

  “Even when you wouldn’t spit on some of them?”

  “Or even,” she said.

  (I remember a kind of shock that ran through me when Kit Brandon said this to me.)

  We had stopped by a little country church that had been twisted off its foundations by a strong wind, perhaps by a tornado, out on the western plains, the windows of the little frame church all broken, the roof half twisted off.

  Such a curiously pathetic little church out on wind-swept South Dakota plains.

  And Kit, such a neat, slender, well-groomed thing, sitting there at the wheel of my car. She had stopped the car and had given me one swift look.

  To be sure, knowing of her what I did know, what had interested me in her as a curious American phenomenon, I did know that, having led the life she had led, having associated so long with the men with whom she had associated, she couldn’t possibly have been what men mean when they say, a pure woman. Just the same she did look so neat — clad in her black jersey and in some kind of a knitted black skirt. Her slender ankles. Her good figure.

  “Or even,” I said, when she had stopped the car, to look at the ruined church. “What do you mean, Kit — or even?”

  The reader will remember that she had been speaking of her mother, of the attitude of her mountain father toward her mother, of his indifference. She was justifying it, saying in her own way, I thought, that to live at all in life as it is, you had to get for yourself self-respect, a foundation. “You have to be strong, even pitiless some times,” I thought she was trying to say.

  “And a woman doing it, the thing you’re talking about, Kit, a woman using the strength in herself... her strength might well be in her physical beauty, you know... her using that to get men, to make them do what she wanted done?

  “Or even — you don’t mean going all the way, just for that in order to gain some end of her own.

  “Her own body?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ve gone through it with men I wouldn’t spit on now. I thought I had to. I guess it just happened so, it was the break I got.”

  Kit, it seemed to me — being with her, having these intimate talks with her — had always the sense in her of life as a kind of game.

  “For Christ’s sake, Kit.”

  “Well, don’t get up-stage on me, man,” she said. “It’s done every day, or at least every night, by plenty of women you’ve met, in the most respectable families.

  “In what is called the best society.”

  “D’you think every woman don’t know that?”

  “Even with husbands, too?” I said.

  “Remember, please,” Kit said, “that I’ve had a husband. He’s in prison now,” she said smiling.

  “Women everywhere, all the time, even the most respectable ones, taking men all the time they don’t give a damn for.”

  “I never heard that it killed any of them yet,” Kit said. “There are times,” she said, “if you happen to be a working girl, as I’ve been, or if you’ve got into a gang such as I’ve been in, when it seems to you it’s about got to be done. Why,” she said, “there’s some, ‘scabs,’ I call them, who’ll do it for an automobile ride.”

  A mountain farm, such as has already been described, or partly described. Kit Brandon, a girl child of fifteen, on such a farm. She would have been a rather intense little worker.

  She would have been out of bed at dawn. Summers came on the mountain farm and then winters. From the time she was six or seven, she went, for a few months each winter, to a mountain school.

  She had to be up early in the morning. From the time when she was tall enough to stand up to the stove she got up and got the breakfast. In the winter there were corn bread and hot hog meat, and in the summer there were greens. She said her father went, in the early spring, far up somewhere into the mountains and got a kind of strange wild onion he called “ramps.” That was to purify the blood from too much and too long eating of the corn bread and the fat hog meat.

  Then she had to clean up the dishes and sweep out the house. She said that the house had no floor. There was just the hard earth, clay she said, made hard and even shiny by much tramping of bare and unwashed feet. There were plenty of creeping crawling things. “We had lice and bedbugs,” she said. She thought, when she was a child, they were companions every one had.

  In the morning her mother stayed in bed, in the same room they ate in, and the bedding was dirty. She was lying there. By the time Kit got big enough to cook and sweep the mother started having kids again. She had Kit. Then she didn’t have any, Kit said, for nearly five years. Then she started in again and in rapid succession she had three, two girls and a boy. Kit said, “I don’t know why Pa suddenly warmed up to her like that. It must have been all he could get at the time.”

  The father was out of bed before Kit and outdoors to the little barn, he always managed to keep neat. Even in winter he stayed out there until Kit called him to come and eat his breakfast and then he ate without looking over toward the messy bed where the wife was lying in silence, just the frowsy head showing above the dirty bedclothes.

  There was always plenty of work for the girl child.

  To sweep out the house with a homemade broom her father had made, to wash the dishes — mend and wash her father’s clothes.

  To school for a few months each winter, for four or five years — to learn anyway to read and write. Spring, summer, fall, and winter.

  The garden to plant and to work in. John Brandon, the father, wouldn’t touch the garden. It was woman’s work, he said. When she was a very little thing he said something to her about the garden that made her prou
d.

  “It made me proud,” she said when she told of it.

  Her father had taken her to the garden. She might have been a girl of eight then. She said he stood with her by a low brush fence he had made. The garden was a small rich plot of ground, in a low place by the creek’s edge. It was early spring and he had plowed it that day. Planting and tending it was no man’s work, he said to the child. He smiled and his white teeth showed under his black mustache. He never chewed tobacco and he didn’t smoke.

  “It’s a woman’s work, planting and tending garden and, goddam it, you, kid, are as near a thing as there is to a woman around here.”

  That work for the child to do and plenty of other work. Doing, doing, for Kit when she was a child.

  Her father taught her to milk the cow. When he was away, on one of his horse-trading trips, that were not primarily trips for gain but just trips to be away, among men, because he liked being among men, she took the cow to the bull when the cow was wanting.

  “And that’s one hell of a job for a child,” she said, “a cow when that time comes for her.

  “She just goes plumb crazy.

  “She’ll go slam bang, right through a fence.

  “She’ll drag you. She’ll knock you down.

  “You cry. You get so mad at her you want to kill her, but it’s a thing that’s got to be done.” She said the nearest bull to the house was three miles away.

  The garden to be taken care of — corn planting and hoeing all day some days in the hillside cornfields, her own clothes to wash and mend and those of her father and the younger children.

  “I wouldn’t wash my ma’s clothes. She tried to get me to do it but I didn’t. She told pap about it, tried to get him to name it to me. I was in the barn, milking, and pap and ma were in the yard. I heard hit. Pap only laughed. ‘Is there anything else you want her to do?’ he asked.”

  Kit, when she spoke of her childhood, occasionally fell into the vernacular. I think she always knew when she did it. She would look at me and laugh, saying “hit” for “it,” and then she’d drop it again.

  In the summer she went berry-picking in the woods and she cut and carried firewood. Sometimes, when her pap went in with some other man or men to make a run of liquor she stood guard. There was only the one road, out of the big road up above, that came down into the little hollow in which the Brandon house stood, and she said there was a clean bare place up there, no brush growing, close up to a little wood, where it cut out of the big wood.

  You had to cross the bare place to come out of the big road into their little road. The whiskey-making would be going on farther up the hollow, where a little stream came down, the mountain laurel and rhododendron so thick you had to know how or you couldn’t force your way through. Kit called the rhododendron laurel and the laurel she called ivy.

  The sheriff had a big yellow car but on the few occasions when he came down into the hollow he left it up above. A wagon could hardly get down into that road. When he came to make a call on them — hardly a social call, I gathered — the sheriff’s car, the big yellow one, stayed up above.

  You could see it and quite a stretch of the big road from the bare place or from a hillside cornfield and Kit stayed in one of these places. She said, even in winter, they left a few shocks of corn in the field, for her to get behind, and in cold weather to stay behind out of the wind.

  And if some one came or the sheriff’s car stopped up there or was on the road — she could see quite a way along the upper road, both ways — she scooted down along a path to the house. She had a bell down there her pap had got somewhere and she rang the bell. She said the sheriff only once came clear down to their house. That was in the winter and there were no leaves on the trees. You could see the still smoke a long ways off. She said her pap had arranged a pile of brush, dry and ready to burn, up at the edge of the cornfield and the woods and that when she had seen the sheriff’s car coming, when it was still far down the road toward town, she got a sudden hunch and lighted the brush pile before running down to the house to ring the bell.

  “I been seeing still smoke down here three or four times now,” the sheriff said. The real still fire was out before he got down to the house. The sheriff was a big man and not one to crawl up a hollow through thick laurel but he had another man with him, a long lean one.

  “What for was you ringing that bell?” he asked Kit, and she said she didn’t answer but stayed still and looked dumb. She said her ma did the same. “It was a signal to pap to come down if any one came,” she said. She said she already knew enough to let her father do the explaining but that when he didn’t come she did speak.

  “He’s been up there clearing brush and burning it.”

  She got hold of the bell and rang it again.

  “Never mind that now,” the sheriff said and laughed.

  From in front of the house, in the little road where he stood, the lean tall man standing with him, he could look up to the cornfield and see the brush burning.

  “Never mind,” he said. “You tell your pap I’ll be back here sometime when they ain’t any bells ringing.” He went back up the road and to his car followed by the tall lean man, a deputy, Kit thought. “You don’t need to ring no more,” he said, smiling at the child. “Your pap’ll have put the still fire out. You might as well look for a run-away nigger in the land of Africa,” he said to the lean man as they went away.

  Kit told of staying up all night once, hid in the brush near the clear place, where the little road went into the big road. That was when once her pap, with two other men, made a really big run. One of the two men Kit had never seen before. He was, she said, a man from down in the county-seat town, a man who some two or three days before had brought bags of corn meal up from town in a truck at night. He was a big, rather rough-looking man, in flashy store clothes. He took the flashy clothes off in the barn and put on overalls and when he had gone up into the brush with the other men she crept into the barn to touch the clothes. “They were pretty flashy, I guess,” she said, but she spoke of the thrill she got, just touching the cloth, so beautifully and tightly woven. “So grand,” she said. It was the first awakening in her of the passion, later so strong in her, for fine clothes, fine automobiles, for anything finely and well made. The man was the first of the big-town bootleggers— “blockaders” — Kit ever saw, one of a kind of man she was to know intimately enough later in life.

  Afterwards, she said, he came into the house and sat by the fire smoking cigars. She was still a barefooted kid, a skinny one, she might have been thirteen. This, she said, was in the late fall, in November, and it was cold. Womanhood had just begun to show itself in her. She didn’t speak of that but she did speak of something that happened.

  It wasn’t much, a little thing, the little thing in a girl child that first tells her she has begun as woman to attract the attention of men.

  Something different in men from the other thing, the way a man touches or caresses a child.

  She was in the house with the man, a big man with big shoulders and a big head.

  “He had a big mouth too and a cigar stuck in the corner and he had funny red bloodshot eyes.”

  He was the sort of man who drinks too much and too steadily but who is so strong drink can’t tear him down.

  There had evidently been a deal made, Kit’s pap and one or two of his horse-trading friends, in with the man from town; he in with some other more important unknown man in the liquor-running business in a big way — a big run to be made for him. Kit’s pap and her ma and the younger children were out in the yard or at the barn and she brought an armload of wood from the yard for the fire in the fireplace inside.

  The big man was sitting there in a chair right close to the fire and he got up. He stood looking at her and she said that there was something strange and a little startling to her in his red bloodshot eyes.

  She just stood, not starting to put down the cut wood, and he came over to her. He began to take the sticks away, one b
y one, and put them down in a pile on the hearth.

  And each time his big red fingers, as he took the sticks from her, touched her in a peculiar way. “They’d brush down, just lightly across my shoulders and my breasts. They’d linger there, feeling my breasts. My breasts were pretty small.”

  She stood and let him do it, frightened, she said, half-paralyzed with a kind of fright new to her.

  “It wasn’t so much the thing he did. I did know and I didn’t know what he was up to, I guess.”

  She spoke at length of the adventure, alone there in the mountain house with the man, wondering how many other women had had a thing like that happen to them when they were so young. “There are men I’ve been with since,” she said, “you know, all the way I mean, and, although I didn’t give a damn for them, what happened didn’t seem to hurt me like that did.”

  And it had been such a little thing, so half casual, the touch of the man’s fingers. She said it would have been so easy to turn and run out at the open door and she spoke also of sounds heard — the whole adventure lasted but a minute — he did it three or four times and then stopped — of the sound of her father’s voice, heard coming from the yard, near the barn, a cow, in a hillside field nearby, heard bawling for its calf.

  And she, the little mountain girl then, with the bare legs and bare feet — thin cotton dress — slender little legs, perhaps blue with the cold. It was only by an effort you could call up the figure of Kit as she must have been then, knowing her when she was a woman, so curiously self-contained.

  “And I must already have known down in me somewhere what a lot of men are like; I’d taken our cow to the bull three times, fighting with her up along our road and to the big road, to make her go to the man who had the bull, up there on the big road.

  “You’re going to be purty. You are purty now,” the big man finally said. He was the first of the professional blockaders she was later to be in with. He’d taken the cigar out of his mouth and she said she remembered it as such a big mouth, with thick lips and big teeth, set wide apart, so you could almost see into the big red cave between the teeth. “It was like looking into a cow’s mouth,” she said.