Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Frank thought that very likely the man with the best horse owned the place where the horses were being shown.

  He explained that Bud, having had always a passionate interest in horses, had remembered about the exhibition in the field more than all the rest seen during the trip. He couldn’t own such a horse, couldn’t get one and so, Frank said, he became a horse and when Kit laughed, thinking perhaps he had again gone a little out of his head, like that other time when he cursed so, he called to Bud.

  “Come here, Bud, and you, Agnes,” Frank called and the couple came across the field. “Now, Bud, you be a horse,” he said, and Kit and Agnes both laughed. “We howled,” Kit said. “It was such a crazy idea.”

  But she said Bud did it. There was a grassy bare place before them and Bud took something from his pockets. It was, she said, a pair of hoofs. “They were made of leather and Bud could strap them on his hands.” The cousin strapped the hoofs on his hands and got down on all fours.

  “He was a horse,” she said.

  “He was a bear.”

  She had never seen a bear. “I know anyway that’s the way a bear looks.

  “The cousin was small and big too. He was black almost,” Kit said.

  He could shamble. He could walk like a bear.

  He could walk like a dog.

  He could prance like a horse. “You take a horse, a stallion, when he’s excited. He could go like that.” She got excited, speaking of it, saying it was so strange to see, so uncanny.

  He could walk on eggs and not break the shells.

  “It may be all men would rather be horses,” Kit said, telling of the odd experience that night in the field. As she told of it she kept laughing, a high shrill laugh, unlike herself. —

  There was white moonlight on a little sloping field, with a flat place below, where she, Frank and Agnes sat, Kit said.

  She said there was white moonlight and green grass. “I think there must have been sheep, or maybe cows pastured in there, in that field, but we didn’t see them.

  “Does a sheep ever want to be a man?” she said.

  “Does a cow ever want to be a man?”

  The little dark squat man from the mountains had a shambling gait, going across an open moonlit place, on green cropped grass — sight of a Southern mill town in the distance... electric lights showing down there. He could prance, trot, single-foot, pace. He could do the slow gallop and the fast gallop.

  The town in the distance, the lights of it were against a night sky. “We’ve got industries, we’ve got progress,” I kept thinking irrelevantly enough, as Kit told of her extraordinary evening.

  The man Bud, young yet, a mountain boy, was short, dark, and squat.

  “We’ve got big factories, in North Carolina, owned by the Dukes. There is a Miss Duke who has more millions of dollars than any young woman who ever lived in the world.

  “We’ve got cigarette factories, we’ve got cotton and silk and rayon mills,” I thought.

  There was a man, in a field, in the moonlight, being a horse. He had caught just the horse rhythm. He could rack fast, across the green earth, in the moonlight, throwing his horse legs out... his arms, strong, young and muscular, that had become legs. They were very strong, his muscular brown, swarthy arms that had become horses’ legs, with hoofs.

  Kit said he could prance. “He could trot, rack, singlefoot,” she kept saying, a kind of wonder in her voice.

  “He was beautiful. He frightened you,” she said. “He was so in earnest about it.” He was determined, absorbed in being a horse — not a common horse but a highly trained, highly bred, aristocrat among horses.

  “Look, I’m doing it. I am being a horse, I am a horse.”

  The pale tall cousin, Frank, the consumptive one, got terribly excited and, for some reason, so also did Kit and Agnes. The man, who was a horse, was in the green flat place where the moonlight was. There was a fence beyond the flat place and he went, with the bright sharp trot of a horse toward it. He leaped on all fours. The consumptive, Frank, got to his feet. Kit thought he might have been a little drunk. He was very proud of his cousin. Agnes held the bottle. She stood up and waved it above her head.

  There was another flat meadow beyond the one where the horse-man had trotted, single-footed, pranced, and again he trotted back toward them. Again he leaped on all fours and again he cleared the fence. “A high one,” Kit said.

  Frank was standing. He was trembling. He might have been drunk. He was weaving back and forth. “See!” he shouted. “He can do it. He can be it.”

  Kit was terribly afraid that Frank would suddenly become ill and so she began to protest. “Don’t. Quit it now,” she cried. She ran and put her arms about Frank’s shoulders. “I knew he wanted so to be strong, to be a horse like that,” she explained. She stood holding the young man Frank, and the big red-haired woman Agnes ran down a little slope to where Bud, absorbed, was still prancing, on all fours, in the moonlight... he was preparing to leap the fence again and Agnes swore as she ran.

  “Now quit it,” she called, “goddam you, you quit it.” She was terribly in earnest, although she laughed. There had been enough of it.

  “Why you little black son-of-a-bitch,” she said, when she had caught Bud and had made him quit it. She was standing near him and he was unstrapping the hoofs from his hands and stowing them away in his pockets. Kit said that Agnes kept swearing at him. She wasn’t really angry. She liked him a lot. Agnes kept laughing and swearing while Bud put the hoofs away in his pockets and they both came back up the slope.

  “We sat on the ground and finished the bottle,” Kit said, “but Frank and I didn’t talk any more about Bud.”

  It was Agnes who talked. “She wasn’t going to miss that chance,” Kit said. Agnes was a big vital woman — woman enough, Kit afterward thought, but not the kind most men would fall for. She was too big, too strong and vital. She thought too much. When Kit had left the mill, when she had been through many adventures, was a bit older, and, in her own way sophisticated, Kit spent a good deal of time thinking of Agnes.

  She always spoke of her, however, with a smile. It was an affectionate smile. What were such women as Agnes to do? Most of the men, the workmen, young and old, in the cotton mill... so many of them like the consumptive Frank... if they were not tubercular they were at least stoopshouldered men, many with narrow chests... they had spent too much of their young lives eating cotton lint, breathing it into their lungs.

  It might be that Agnes needed and even wanted gentling by life, by intimacy with some man, but where among the mill men was she to find one to do it to her? If she had been married to a farmer, say somewhere out on the Western plains, heavy hard work to do, shoulder to shoulder with a man, her partner and lover....

  Unlike the others in the field that night she had read books, she had been to meetings. Although she was still young she had worked in several mills, had been in strikes and at strike meetings. There had been socialist agitators in the mill towns and the communists had come in. Later, after Kit left the mill, Agnes was a figure in the communist strike at Gastonia in North Carolina.

  She had been playing with Bud, the horse-man, in the field as Frank had talked to Kit but had overheard some of the talk. Once or twice she had left Bud. They had been wrestling, laughing and pushing each other about, but suddenly stopped. She gave Bud a push that sent him sprawling. “Now quit. Let me alone. I don’t want to,” she said, and there was something in her voice that commanded. It was always there when she wanted to use it.

  She left Bud standing, or sprawled thus... he was laughing. The play between them had been like two puppies at play. She walked away from him.

  She came to stand near where Kit and Frank were sitting. Frank was telling of Bud’s trip into the East, of the things he had seen, of the men and women of the saddle-horse farm, and Bud’s excitement, lying on top of the truck parked in the road. She had stood near them for a moment, listening intently, saying nothing and then, with a shrug of her
shoulders, had walked away. She began again the play with Bud.

  The four people were seated on the grass on the little hill and had finished the bottle. Agnes looked at Bud, who had stowed away his leather hoofs. “Why, you little black bastard... that you should have learned to do that,” she said, and, having said it, laughed. She was wanting to tell Kit and the two men something of what she thought the significance of what Bud had seen on his trip into the East —— down out of the hill country and into the low country —— and hesitated because she was trying to find words for what was in her mind. She was an odd and a striking figure sitting thus. Her legs, like strong pillars, were spread apart and she had big shoulders and a strong neck.

  Her neck was like the necks of men Kit saw later, when she was married and went with her husband to professional wrestling matches and, although her head looked small, it was covered with a mass of thick yellow hair that had become disarranged during her wrestling bouts with Bud and now hung in a thick mass over her shoulders.

  “It is just so, everywhere,” she said suddenly. She had lighted a cigarette — she was the only one of the little party that smoked — and when she talked her arms moved about, as though she were addressing an audience, making gestures, like one of the professional speakers, the agitators she had heard. The lighted end of the cigarette kept making little bright arches before the eyes of the others.

  They had all become silent and she told them of her thoughts. There was, she said, something rotten in the fact that Bud, with his love of fine horses and wanting one, had to come down to being a horse. “What the hell — I’ll bet you he works harder than any of the guys who own the horses,” she said and, reaching over to where Bud sat, grasped his arms. She gave him a little push so that he fell over and lay on his side and then began again to attempt to put her thoughts into words.

  Agnes was excited and although the others did not understand some of the words and thoughts that came pouring out of her they also got excited. She talked a little incoherently and brokenly. She was young and strong. Perhaps she felt within herself the conviction growing that in the life of the factory there was no chance for something within herself to grow, that it was choked there, the conviction that is in so many younger Americans now, that the day of opportunity is gone here, an old myth that in America any one may rise to dizzy heights of splendor quite exploded. She tried passionately to express the thing most wanted, by all men and women, not only in America but over the entire earth. She thought it was some basis of self-respect. The performance of Bud in the field, his becoming for the time a horse, not a man, had in some odd way hurt her. “It isn’t that we want, to give up manhood.” She could not put her thoughts into such straight words but Kit and perhaps Frank, for all his pride in his cousin’s performance, had been shocked as well as amused. “The thing we want, the thing we want.” Agnes was struggling for words. In spite of the jumble of words that came from her she did in some way get her thoughts into the others.

  The thing most essentially wanted by all men and women, always, everywhere. “Give me some basis of self-respect. Let me stand on my own feet.”

  The thing felt sometimes by even the poorest little mountain farmer, working as young Bud did his tiny bit of poor mountain land.

  “See! Look! I did it!” In the factories, Agnes said, growing coherent and for a moment talking coherently, a man or woman got too much lost, was made to feel too small. She was remembering her experience in union struggles in factories, the right of the workers to organize, to feel themselves as having even a small part in the running of the factories and the conditions under which they labored, this right always being denied and ridiculed. Kit thought Agnes was thinking at the moment not of Bud and his performance but of the tubercular Frank. In the factory she said great care was taken to keep the dust from accumulating on the machines. Hoods came down over the machines to suck the dust from them while the workers were left to breathe it into the lungs.

  The Farmer... “See! Look! I did it!”

  “I have made the corn stand up on this poor little piece of land. I have worked here and something has resulted.”

  “I went, in the winter, up into the woods. I brought down leaf mould. I gathered together brush and burned it. I had no money to buy fertilizer. I put the leaf mould from the woods and the ashes from the fires on the land and plowed them in. I made something grow. Look! It is the best stand of corn in all of this neighborhood.”

  Pride in work, in something done. Kit thought later that Agnes had been hurt by Bud’s performance, by something not very healthy she had felt in it. It might have been too much humility. She did not understand what it was that night in the field. The night was, however, educational to her.

  Man wanting so little really. See the farmer, even on poor land, who has raised a small patch of good corn. He can walk a little more proudly. Something grows in man through work. It can be killed when his work is degraded.

  Workers in factories also wanting — Agnes was terribly in earnest. “She was more educated than the rest of us,” Kit said. The thing most wanted is so little, so seldom, understood. “They think we want revolution, to kill some one,” Agnes said. “It is all nonsense,” she declared. She had begun talking over the heads of the others but, in a dim way, they did all understand. Kit when she told of Agnes’ talk had been through a lot. She was older and shrewder than the hill girls in the field.

  “Why even — it is seldom any one speaks of it — we want love, understanding, respect. Do not do that to man which takes from him his self-respect.

  “Do not do it.”

  “Do not do it.”

  In the woman worker Agnes, in the field with the others, there was something perhaps half man.

  And also, Kit knew, something that could be made tender.

  Kit remembered an incident in the factory. There was a young girl with her hand hurt in one of the machines and the profane strong Agnes had been deeply touched by the suffering of another. Afterwards Agnes had gone up and down on her “side,” doing her work, but there were tears in her eyes and she cursed as she worked. The girl who had been hurt was very pretty and she would lose two or three fingers.

  “She’ll be maimed. It will spoil her chance of getting what she wants.”

  Kit had understood that. She herself was attractive to men.

  Something, more deeply felt, Agnes was trying to put into words. She didn’t succeed very well. She had heard speakers talk. She had read books. The factory workers in America were, after all, not as yet too far away from their fathers and grandfathers. Agnes called them “our old people.” She also had come to the factories out of a mountain home. For the most part the people of the mountains had been in America for many generations. They were not too far away from something else, something once very much alive... individuality... the day of America’s greater richness...

  Day of the farmers on their own land... plenty of free land to be had for the taking...

  Day of the craftsman too...

  “There is that wagon, carriage, suit of clothes... worn by that dude you see going along the street there... the pair of shoes... that chair, bed... this table at which we sit eating the food grown on our own land here...

  “The cotton from our fields, flax and the wool from our sheep. In the log cabin that was my father’s house there stood an old spinning wheel. It still stands there, in a corner, forgotten. Let it stand. I do not want it back...

  “It is, however, a symbol... day of our participation... of our own hands doing completely. They could give us the feeling back, in the factories, if they would. They won’t. They are stupid. They don’t want to understand.

  “The big factories, so huge, so magnificent. Who are they making cloth for?” Agnes turned fiercely upon Kit. “Say, you swell kid, you want silk stockings to wear, now don’t you?” She awoke, made real a hunger that was in Kit. It was a hunger that influenced all her later life....

  The big factories, so huge, so magnificen
t, the thousands of fast beautiful machines....

  “They have a way of making us feel, too much, just a part of the machines. Why do they want to do it? It hurts. It eats in.

  “The continual strutting of those up above... they think, they believe, they are above us... the way their women do it... why do they do it, the fools?

  “They want us to be humble. Are they humble?

  “We come out of the factory after one of the long days or a longer night. Do they think we are blind? Can’t we see? We see so much blossoming in America, fine roads being built, the automobiles, always getting faster, more beautiful. We see rich women, richly gowned. We see beautiful houses built for those who never made anything with their hands.”

  Agnes spoke fiercely of Bud’s experience, of his seeing the rich men in the field showing off the beautiful saddle horses. Who were they? Had they a right to such creatures? Bud became uncomfortable. He sat with head down muttering words the others could not hear.

  “Fools, why don’t they give us a chance?” Agnes spoke of labor leaders who had come to factories where she had been employed. Why didn’t they get more down to the guts of things, why didn’t they? They were always talking about wages and hours. “I don’t care about that, not first of all,” Agnes said. She jumped to her feet and stood over the others. Her cigarette had been thrown aside. “I want... I want... Oh, hell,” she said. There was a moment of silence and then she looked down at the others and laughed. “Well, come on. Let’s get out of here. I’ve blown off steam long enough. Time to go home,” she said, and the others got to their feet and followed her, across the field and over a fence into the road.

  They walked down along the road, the four of them, an oddly mixed lot. It was a dirt road, gravelled and smooth, and presently they came to a place of houses. It was quite near the town, some two or three miles outside the town limits, their own mill village, as were other mill villages, quite separated from the real town....

  Place of others, their lives, of the lawyers, doctors, individual workmen... what was left of these in such towns... shoe repair men, house painters, clerks in stores, men who delivered milk and eggs to houses, truck drivers, carpenters, plumbers....