It may be the time will come, in the march of men, when your work will stand with that of other unknown men who built cathedrals in the Middle Ages.
It was all puzzling, new and strange enough to Kit Brandon, the night life in the big singing rooms in the mill, the other men and women, many girls, half children, so many of them, in the upper South, like Kit, off mountain farms, brought there from lonely quiet places...
.. that they got love for the machines they tended.
.. that they got love of factories.
Kit... “I liked it at night. There were two girls on a side. Mine was a tall red-haired girl.
“She was fierce. She could swear like a man.
“We had to tie in the broken threads. Sometimes a thread broke at one end of the long side and when a thread broke the machine stopped.
“You had to run there.
“Then a thread broke at the other end and you ran.
“Sometimes a lot of running, up and down, up and down.
“It was good to be young, with strong legs. It was good.”
Kit spoke of how the singing noise in the mill was louder than your voice, even if you shouted. She thought it nice. You were lost in it.
She spoke of the lights at night, the way the moving shadows of machines, strange fantastic shapes, like in a dream, even shadow of the thin delicate thread, danced on the walls.
“Yes,” I said, “making sometimes, lovely moving designs.”
“What?” Kit said, staring at me.
The feeling workers get in the great factories of America... no poets among them yet to sing of it... the song, coming some day to be a part of the coming revolution too... the end of the glory of the day of the buyers and sellers, of the money men...
.. the new thing in man’s life, the machine in America so perfect, so intricate, doing so many marvellous things so marvellously.
Youngsters, almost children, driving modern high-speed American automobiles, over American roads — such roads never before known in all the world. Let’s begin to sing this.
In the factory where Kit worked there seemed to be a little level of sounds, a plateau, not used by the machines and the young voices rode along this.
The night superintendent was always walking softly, unexpectedly, through the rooms.
When one of the threads broke a machine stopped.
And there was the room foreman, Kit said he was always snooping around.
She said the big, raw-boned red-haired girl, on her “side,” swore viciously. In spite of all the rawness and hardness of her earlier life Kit had never heard much profanity.
The red-haired girl spoke of the room foreman as a lousy bastard.
“He’s a goddam rat, a lousy bastard, I tell you. You look out for him, kid.”
She told Kit of how the man, who was married and had kids, sometimes, in the middle of the night, when he knew the superintendent had gone out of the mill to get his midnight lunch, tried to get some young girl, the younger the better... he wanted to break ’em in — that was what he wanted. The red-haired woman was named Agnes. “The bastard’s got a yen for the young ones, the green ones, the fresh ones.”
He took them into a little shut-off room, at a corner of the big room.
“The lousy bastard... if he makes a proposition to a girl, in there, and she won’t, he’ll lay for her, try to find something wrong with her work —
.. “too many machines stop on her side too often and he gets her fired for it.”
There was Agnes, the red-haired woman, who worked with Kit on her side and Kit herself. A pale young man, concerning whom Kit had begun her tale of mill girl life, also worked in the room. She said he was her first beau. He had already, on several occasions, come to see Kit at her rooming house, usually on a Saturday night. He came to the house and they sat together. There was a little porch at the front of the house. He was tubercular and told Kit he knew he hadn’t long to live. Even a short walk tired him. Once they went down out of the mill village and sat on a bridge over a small stream. On moonlight nights they could see mountains in the distance. “He talked and talked. He liked talking to me,” she said naively.
He thought it all wrong that he should be destined to die. The nearness of death made him talk strangely, “nicely,” Kit thought. He thought a man should have at the least two hundred years of life, a hundred years, he said, to find out things and then another hundred to live— “in knowing” — he said.
There came moments between the two. “Come,” he said to Kit one Saturday night... the mill remained closed on Saturday nights... they had climbed a low hill. They were in a meadow. “Lie down here on the grass with me,” he said.
It was a moonlit night. “He made love to me,” Kit said.
She was embarrassed, trying to find words to tell of it, of what had happened. They were there, on the grass, in the meadow, not far from the mill village, and in the distance they could see the hills out of which they had both come.
But maybe they couldn’t see the hills. Kit was trying to explain something that was difficult for her to get at. If she was embarrassed it was not because of what happened but because of the difficulty of finding words.
In the sick young man there was something going on, concerned with the hills. “Why were we brought down here? Not only me but you, all of us?”
The big raw-boned, red-haired woman, Agnes, after Kit left the place, became a strike leader, a union organizer. “She was swell. She was a fighter,” Kit said.
There were young men who came along the “sides” where the girls worked, tying in the broken threads. The men trundled little carts with rubber-tired wheels. They took off full bobbins and put on empties. There were conversations with the girls, flirtations started. “Some of the girls and women,” Kit said, “on some of the sides, got pretty gay.”
There were men who made whispered proposals to the girls. “Eh, kid, what about it, eh? If you’ll come across I’ll take you to the movies on Saturday night.”
Or to get even gayer, pinch a girl’s leg, or slap her behind, Kit said.
Some of the girls, on some of the sides, didn’t care. They liked it. They’d giggle, or maybe slap the gay one’s face.
“Good God,” the big red-head Agnes said to Kit, “a girl had better learn fast in this dump or some of these smart guys, to say nothing of that lousy bastard of a foreman, will take it away from her fast and then she won’t have it no more.
“Or she’ll get something in her belly that’ll make her quit jumping fences,” she said.
She was out to teach Kit, but Kit said she already knew. “I guess maybe my own pap had wised me up,” she said. She said that naturally she kept her mouth shut about that.
She talked of the pale young man who came, trundling one of the little carts to take off and put on bobbins on her side. He wasn’t like the others. “He was pale,” she said, “too pale.” They became friends and that led to her walks with him.
He spoke, softly and persistently, in a low voice. Where had he got so many words? Why were we brought down? What made us come? Words about the mill and the mill village. What had got into the hill people that they trooped down out of the silent hills to the big towns?
They got lost dawn there... they were nameless ones. —
He talked, even a little irrationally, of the mill, at night. “We were in there last night, all night, the night before. Six nights every week we are in there.
“There is a singing.” He said. “There is a singing and I can’t sing with it.” He was a little feverish.
He wanted to talk to her of something, about something in the mill, the roaring song always going on in there, the speed, speed, speed of the shining machines.
“I’m so tense. I want to shout.
“If I was strong, if I wasn’t sick.
“I’m a young man, I should be strong. It ain’t fair.
“Sometimes if I could yell, or dance.”
Odd to think that the young man, so
quiet-seeming, when he was in the mill at work, could have been thinking such things, feeling such things. He was so quiet, never getting smart, trying to grab the girls, date them up. He was one of the ones who did something to Kit, one of the first ones...
To make her a little grown up, she thought.
He lay on the grass in the meadow beside her and swore, curses bubbling up to his lips. His face was very pale there in that light.
He cursed and it seemed to Kit, then and later, a kind of inhuman thing — from such a gentle-seeming one, one who had always been so quiet, “so gentlemanly,” she said.
As though the sky, dimly seen overhead, cursed, the ground, the blades of grass in the field cursing.
It bubbling out of him, the sick young man, half boy, so pale, so near death. He died, she said, a short time after that night.
The whole experience was to her weird but very real. She said she wasn’t afraid of him. “He was lying there and I laid down beside him, quite close.”
The curses that came from him, she said, had something to do with God. He broke off cursing and talked and then the cursing began again. He had been, he tried to tell her, religious, had gone to church when he was a young boy back in the hills.
They had talked of Heaven and he didn’t want Heaven. He wanted to be strong — maybe a baseball player or even a prizefighter, not to be always tired and coughing... he stopped talking to curse for a time... sometimes having hemorrhages, he had had several, blood that should have been the blood of a strong young man coming up, out of his body through his throat.
It might have been the lint in the air in the mill. He had been told that. If it were true he wanted God’s curses on those that let it happen.
He had an idea. He had been lying on his back, his face to the night sky, but sat up. Perhaps it was money. People were always wanting more money — like his father and mother. But they had been fools to come out of the hills for it. He said he had thought about it. What good did money do people? The mountain people got a little money in the crowded mill village but it went like water. He had heard that some of the mill owners got rich. Well, what of it? Were they taller, stronger, did their food taste better?
He was kneeling beside Kit and leaned over, looking directly down at her. “No,” he said, in a half whisper, “it isn’t people. It’s God. Why does he put evil things in people and in things too.”
He spoke in a rapid whisper, telling a tale. As a young boy, when he and his people still lived in the hills, his mother was ill. He was coming home from a mountain schoolhouse.
He said it was in the fall and he tried to tell Kit how nice-looking the hills were, the trees in their full colors. He had wanted to take some of the niceness of it home, to the mountain cabin where his mother was lying ill, and had pushed in to a place of thick bushes. There were fall flowers. There were brightly colored berries. He had made a bouquet... he called it, “a flower pot.”
And he had got covered with poison ivy, from head to foot, was himself in bed for two weeks, writhing in misery. Why? Why?
His voice rose and he seemed about to shout. Kit was lying quietly beside him. “I didn’t intend the flowers any harm, the bushes, the ivy itself... “I didn’t intend any of it any harm. I didn’t know it was there.”
Kit said that, suddenly, she didn’t know why she did it, she was pretty young then... she reached up her hand and touched his pale cheeks.
“I kept on doing it and he got quiet.” She said she kept on doing it, suddenly feeling older than he was, and that presently he began touching her body with his hand. She said she didn’t mind, that she let him put his hand, softly like that, all over her body. She said he got very quiet after that but kept talking, but this time without excitement or curses, of how touching her made him feel as though he were well, as though he were again a young boy in the hills, when he was strong, when he could run a long way without tiring.
A young man, from back in the hills, came to visit the consumptive young man. His name, Kit said, was Bud and the sick young man’s name was Frank. Bud was Frank’s cousin. Kit laughed, speaking of Bud. He was a strong young fellow, very dark and with a small bulletlike head, covered with coarse black hair.
The young consumptive, Frank, had arranged for an evening. “We’re going to do something,” he said. He got Kit and Agnes, the red-haired one. “She was fierce,” Kit said. Frank went and brought a large bottle of moon whiskey. It was the only time Kit had ever known him to drink.
They set out, again to the fields, the four of them, in the moonlight, on a summer night. “We went out of the mill village but not to the town. We went around it.” They kept circling the town, going through fields, avoiding farmhouses. “We would stop and sit down. We’d drink. The stuff burned my throat.”
Kit had got a little wild. “I had been ashamed to go near any one but I wasn’t any more.” They were going up a little hill and she ran to the young man Bud and threw her arms about his neck. She kissed him, and Agnes and Frank both laughed. Frank didn’t get a bit tired that night,” she said.
There were some brush piles on top of a low hill, where some farmer had been at work, clearing land overgrown by brush, and she got some matches from Bud and ran to light them.
“Then we all ran, laughing, not to be caught by some farmer when the flames leaped up through the brush piles. Frank also ran. Kit said he seemed to forget about being ill although it was but a few weeks before he died.
They got over on another hill, to another farm, and lying on the ground watched, the four of them, their bodies close together. Kit said it was fine, watching the fires on the hill. They kept drinking out of the bottle. A farmer, with his wife and three children, came from a farmhouse and stood by the fires. He kept staring about. He had two dogs and they barked. Frank’s cousin, Bud, his shyness also swept away by the drink, got to his feet. “Howdee! Howdee!” he shouted at the top of his voice.
They got up and ran farther away. She said that Agnes, who was so fierce— “She was loud-mouthed,” Kit said — got very gentle.
Bud, the cousin from the hills, had a stunt he did. He was a young fellow who had a passion for horses, and as his people were very poor he could not own a horse. “At least,” Frank told Kit, walking with her that night, “he couldn’t own one he wanted.” Frank had been drinking steadily. He was such a talker. “He got gabby,” Kit said. He wanted to explain his cousin.
The cousin had gone one time on a trip with a truck. Frank told Kit that Bud lived near a town called Brevard, in North Carolina, and that there was a big tannery in a near-by town.
They had begun to take truckloads of leather through the hills and up through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia to the eastern cities and Bud knew a fellow who drove one of the trucks.
“I bet you don’t know how big the world is,” Frank said to Kit. The sick young man was very gay. He seemed strong. His cousin had told him the story of his trip out into the big world and it was as though it had been an experience of his own. “He was that kind,” Kit said. “He could imagine things.”
They all sat down on the grass in a field and Frank kept talking. Agnes and Bud sat some distance away. They began playing. First they wrestled and then they chased each other about the field. Frank was proud of his cousin. “He’s smart. He’s seen a lot,” he said.
“I’ll bet you don’t know how big the world is.” In their wanderings that night the four people had got back to where they could see, in the distance, the lights of their mill town. Frank pointed toward it.
“There must be a thousand, a million towns, bigger’n that,” he said. He pointed to the sky. There’s as many towns as the stars up there,” he said.
“And people too.” He tried to tell Kit of the people Bud had seen in city streets, of the crowds of people, well-dressed people, he said. He thought it must have been wonderful for Bud seeing all that and getting suddenly sad, said he’d give anything, even one of his arms or a leg, have them sawed off, just to be well himsel
f and go out like that to see so much.
Frank’s sadness didn’t last long that night. The fellow Bud was with, an older man of the mountain town, had got the job as truck driver after working in a garage. He had been on the trips to eastern cities several times. He had planned to go to Philadelphia but he went the long way, to show Bud Baltimore and Washington.
And somewhere in Pennsylvania, or Frank said it might have been in Virginia, there was a big horse farm where fine saddle horses were trained and knowing how Bud felt about horses the man had stopped the truck.
“There were people, beautifully dressed, and horses, more beautiful than the people.” Frank spoke as though he had seen everything himself. Kit said he was like a fellow reading something out of a book. There were the people in a field, walking around... there were white fences like a house — painted... Well-dressed men and beautiful women. “The grass was just like on a lawn,” Bud had said. There were shining thin dresses with flowers on them.”
“They didn’t charge anything to get in.” If it hadn’t been for the truck Bud and the man could have gone in. He didn’t want to leave his truck.
“So they stopped the truck in the road and Bud crawled up and sat on top of it.”
There were barns as big as a factory. There was an old man, with a white beard and with a young woman on his arm. They were walking in the field but came down near the fence by the road where the truck was. They passed so close to the fence that the young woman’s gown touched it. “She smelled like a flower or like a Balm of Gilead tree when it is in bloom, or like sassafras,” Bud had said.
They were bringing horses into the field and they were being put through their gaits, shown off. They trotted, freely, fiercely. They racked. They single-footed and galloped. Some of the riders shouted as though with delight at being on such beautiful beasts and all the people standing and watching clapped their hands. There was one rider, all in black, with a shiny black hat and a white stiff-looking shirt. The shirt was very white and he had a long whip.
“Hi-hi,” he called to his horse in a shrill voice. “He had the best horse of them all, the most beautiful one.”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 181