Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  She was having thoughts about Frank, now dead, as Agnes talked. Agnes was talking of revolution. She was always at that. She was talking of a new world workers were some day to make. The pale young man at the table in the little shabby speak-easy might have been a young Duke, or son, say of some great cotton-mill baron, or a cigarette baron.

  There are huge life-insurance companies in North Carolina. He might have been the son of a millionaire president of a life-insurance company.

  He might have been, like the working boy Frank, a dreamer. “He’s got it, I bet, like Frank had,” Kit thought. She meant tuberculosis.

  Odd to think about people — supposing the young man at the table to be something of the sort suggested above, getting the same disease a lad like Frank got. He’d have come to the little dump maybe just to be with people. “This rot-gut whiskey won’t do me any good but what’s the difference? I’m gone anyway.”

  Kit Brandon off on her own, a million miles from Agnes, talking away opposite her. She was thinking of her last evening with the dying boy Frank.

  She had walked out with Frank on another Saturday evening.

  It was winter time too, then, but it was warm. It was the last time he had been outdoors before he died.

  He had got an obsession. He had sent her word: “I want to see you. You come Saturday night.” A woman who worked in the mill and had a room in the same house he lived in had brought Kit the word and she had gone to him.

  They had walked out, going slowly, and had got finally into a little lane, leading into a field. It was a place, just outside of town, where there was a farmhouse on one side of a road and a barn, in a field, on the other. The barn was set quite far back from the road and the lane led down to it.

  The farmhouse was quite dark. “Come in here with me,” Frank had said to her. He explained that he couldn’t walk far. They went into the lane and Frank told her what he wanted. “That other night,” he said — they were in the lane, just off the road— “when I touched you the way I did, with my hands... I didn’t have the nerve to ask you then but now... if I don’t ask you I won’t get another chance...

  “Because I’m going to die soon, now.

  “I want you to, with me, because I never did and I do want to before I die.”

  Kit had let it happen. “Why not?” she had thought that night. She had let him and they had got caught, just after it was over — a man, perhaps a farmhand coming along the lane. Fortunately, they didn’t quite get caught. They had a chance to get to their feet.

  “What the hell you doing in here?”

  They hadn’t said anything but had hurried away out of the lane and back to Frank’s place, as fast as they could go, he being as he was. They sat on the porch together at the house for a time and he cried and told her something. “I didn’t want it to be disturbed like that,” he said. He had tried to explain something of what he had wanted, a kind of sealing together, of himself with her, a living in profound nothingness with another — once, once before he died. He had a kind of idea. “I might live on in you,” he said.

  As to whether or not Kit had understood what Frank had meant that night she didn’t know. She was in the little speak-easy thinking of it as Agnes talked. Her thoughts had been aroused in her by the face, the eyes, of another young man at the near-by table, like and unlike Frank, now dead. She and Agnes had their drinks and Agnes talked and then paid the check. Agnes was a little irritated, perhaps, feeling that her talk had been falling on deaf ears. She got excited.

  She had been telling the story of another strike she had been in and of how, after the failure of the strike, the workers were left stranded, as at Marion, North Carolina. All the labor leaders, even the young radicals from the North, had got on trains and gone away.

  “Why the hell don’t they stay with us when we’re licked, take what we have to take?” she said in a loud voice, and the men at the near-by table all turned and stared. She and Kit both became self-conscious. “Let’s get out of this dump,” Agnes said, and they had got up to go out when one of the young men at the other table jumped up and tried to detain Kit. The one who did it was a little drunk. He grabbed Kit by the arm. “Look here,” he said. “Say, you’re a sweet kid,” he said. He held her by the arm and when Agnes advanced to the rescue he threw out his free arm trying to brush her aside. “I don’t want you,” he said, “I want this one.” The other young men at the table were laughing and the pale young man, who was so like and unlike Frank, was trying to protest. “Ah, Jim, Jim, let her alone,” he was saying when Agnes, with a quick wide swing of her arm, struck the drunken young man in the face with her fist and knocked him to the floor.

  There was an outbreak, an outcry, a racket, and the woman of the place ran into the room. She protested. Two or three of the other young men, at the table with the drunken one, had helped him to his feet and were holding him. He was swearing and the woman of the place kept protesting. “Be quiet! Oh, please, please be quiet,” she was saying as Kit and Agnes slipped past her out of the room and got out again into the street. They walked up and down the main street of the town. It still snowed and Agnes had become quiet. She had perhaps been hurt by two things, that Kit had not listened to her talk in the speak-easy and that the drunken man had made the sharp distinction between herself and Kit. As the two young women walked up and down the main street of the town, the snow still falling, snow clinging to the coats of people, lighted store fronts shining through the falling snow, Kit felt the night beautiful.

  Agnes didn’t. She soon wanted to go home. “We might as well,” she said. She spoke of clothes ruined, shoes ruined. The night had turned suddenly ugly for her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THERE WERE ALL kinds of fellows in with Tom Halsey, more or less under his orders, some bold ones, some sly crafty ones, some brutes. They talked, whispered among themselves. “What the hell?” It was because of Tom Halsey’s son, young Gordon Halsey. He had got stuck on the skirt — Kit Brandon.

  There was that other woman, Kate, a good deal older than Kit. She was all right. She knew how to keep her mouth shut.

  But just the same. It was an old, old idea — cherchez la femme. “They gab. You get in a jam and you are mixed up with some dame and, sure as hell, she runs out on you.”

  The old war between men and women. Many of the mountain men who worked with Tom Halsey... Tom was a pioneer, a bringer of a new and modern world into the mountain life,... they were of an older order.

  You saw a mountain man coming into some little mountain town afoot. He strode along the road ahead of his woman, did not walk beside her. Many of the mountain men had big families. The children walked in the road behind, the girl children at the end of the little procession. When a son of the family had reached maturity, began to think of himself as a man, he stepped ahead of his mother and walked just at the heels of his father.

  The women submitted. A mountain man did not do any work about the house. He did not milk the cow, feed the pigs, carry firewood into the house. He crept away to the woods to make himself a run of liquor; he worked in his few hillside fields.

  But the new world had come, even into the hills. Paved roads were being poshed through. They twisted and wound along little river bottoms, under majestic hills, occasionally climbed over a hill and went on down into another valley. Industrial towns had come, some of them growing swiftly, towns of North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Eastern Kentucky, Southwest Virginia. Tourists in Fords, Chevrolets, Buicks, Packards went whirling along roads and through the hills. The industrial towns had come because of power in the rivers of the hills and because of cheap labor. There were still hundreds of square miles of country in the mountains apparently uninhabited, but not uninhabited. The tourist going along in his car looked about. “What a desolate country!” He was mistaken. There were many thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people, hidden away, in little hollows, on mountain sides, in mountain cabins no car could climb up to. The mountain people had lived thus for many genera
tions. Books had been written about them, tales of mountain feuds... the Hatfield-McCoys of West Virginia, stories out of Breathitt County, Kentucky... sentimental yarns.... “Trail of the Lonesome Pine.”

  There were garages strung along the new big highways and these were often gathering places for Tom’s men. How quickly they had taken to the automobile. They gathered before such places, sat about, some in overalls. A surprising number of them could not read or write. They were outwardly listless enough looking men. They talked slowly and quietly. As always happens, the mind of the man out of another world too much influenced by the reading of newspapers, popular magazines and novels, could not differentiate. The mountain men were thought of, by tourists passing swiftly through the hills, as all of a type. They were dangerous, secretive, sly. They spent their time hunting “federals” or shooting at each other. It was of course all nonsense. They were of every type, incipient poets, honest hard-working men, killers, horse traders, liars, men faithful to friends unto death, stupid ones, smart ones, God-seeking ones. It is true that in lonely isolated places things did happen. What Kit’s father had, she thought, intended doing to Kit was not a too unusual thing. They lived in a country long out of the path of so-called American progress, a country long forgotten. The westward drift of population in America in earlier days had been along rivers and across the plains, over the Alleghanies from the East and down the Ohio, or along the upper lake region.

  Then out into the fat rich plains, the prairie country, the great American agricultural empire. A man of Tom’s crowd took a load of liquor into Ohio. He came back and talked. During the Civil War Mosby’s raiders cut across river from Kentucky into the North. They would have been Southern boys, for the most part Poor Whites, fighting they did not know what for. They raided through Indiana and Ohio and some of them came back.

  They came back shaking their heads. Talks at night by Confederate camp fires. “Boys, we can never lick that people. Why, look how our fields are desolated. Up there the barns are groaning, towns are growing, even while this war is going on. They are too big, fat, and well-fed for us.”

  Mountain man, of Tom Halsey’s crowd, in a garage, talking to other mountain men. “Good God, Jim, Fred, Joe, Harry, here we are. We scratch the ground on one of these hills to raise a little corn. It gets up shoulder high and we think we’ve got a crop. Little scrawny corn stalks as big as my finger. Up there the corn is like trees and you should see their towns, the way their women dress, the houses they live in.”

  It was no wonder that the money crop of the hills, moon-liquor, had, under prohibition, got so important. Tom Halsey, in organizing, drawing together under one head, a scattered industry of thousands of small units, had but followed in the footsteps of others in a modern world — organized steel, the oil industry, tobacco, the woollen industry. Control the illicit liquor business, control and organize crime. Although Tom Halsey did not have an office in an office building, board of directors’ room with mahogany table, etc., he was ambitious. He felt himself in the American business tradition. He had thought about it, had his own pride. He felt that American business men, captains of industry, were really big men and that he was on the road to bigness.

  The mountain empire in the very heart of America was long forgotten. In Old Virginia the big families, the F. F. V.’s, are nearly all in the Tidewater country. The Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons all lived in Tidewater. They forgot the mountain country, the mountain men. Daniel Boone lived out there, Abe Lincoln’s people came from the hills. The mountain men were the adventurers, openers up of Kentucky, of Tennessee, of what is now West Virginia — land of coal. Once the mountain men tried to get out from under the overlordship of Tidewater Virginia. They organized the state of Franklin, a purely mountain state, elected a governor and United States senators. They didn’t get away with it.

  The men of Tom Halsey’s crowd, bringers of the new era into the hills, whiskey-making organized, put on a business basis, on their hours off loafing before a roadside garage, looked out over a lovely country.

  The garage, let us say, is high up, near a mountain top, where one of the new paved roads sweeps up out of one river valley to pass over and into another. The men’s eyes are accustomed to the sight before them. However, and although the mountain folk do not often speak of it, not being given to flowery talk, there is in them a deep love of their hill country. Some of the men of Tom Halsey’s liquormaking, liquor-handling, liquor-running crowd, men who under Tom began suddenly to make money, to drive automobiles, to take trips down out of the hills and even into the rolling hill country of southern Ohio and Pennsylvania... some of them had been as far away from their home hills as Detroit... belonged to families that had been in the hills since before the Revolutionary War. They were sons and grandsons of men who had got the hill country love, love of isolation and independence, into their blood. They were poor men but they were no time-clock punchers. They didn’t become clerks in stores and banks. “I am poor but be careful. Do not tread too hard on my toes.” When a stranger came into the hills he was watched, but the mountain men were not necessarily suspicious lest he be a federal. The poorest mountain man, living in the most isolated hollow of the hills, in the greatest poverty, often in a one-room cabin with a dirt floor, when such a stranger came to his door invited him into his house, invited him to eat, to spend the night, to stay, if he wished, in the poor hovel for a long visit.

  A surprising number of the men in the American Southern Highlands are Scotch-Irish, so-called. It does not mean, however, that they are half Irish. It means that, in old Europe, an English king once sent mountain Scots into Ireland and gave them free land there but mountain people are like the French. They hate paying taxes. The English king tried to tax them and great hordes of them came to America. They were always whiskey makers. Their ancestors had made pot liquor in Scotch hills. They came through Pennsylvania and down through the valley of Virginia, the “Shenandoah” and to the hills because they were hill people. They were in the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in early days. “What was all this business about taxes? What has government done for us that we should pay taxes?” For generations the material growth of America had gone on, a great boast, a great wonder, railroads built, later highways built, schools built, cities built. It hadn’t happened in the hill country, in all the great sweep of mountain country, starting in the East, almost within sight of the capital at Washington, and sweeping westward, through Virginia, touching North Carolina, taking in a great part of West Virginia, Tennessee, Northern Alabama, and Georgia, Kentucky, and Missouri.

  It is true that modern industry had done something to, if not for, the hill country. The great lumber kings had invaded the country. There had been thievery of great boundaries and ruthless cutting and slashing. An old story, the whole country may some day realize what a tragic story.

  In the early days the mountain men, families, drifted into the hills one by one and settled there. They knew little of courts of law. Titles for land when acquired were often not recorded in the courts. After all Daniel Boone, at the end of all his exploring, his daring penetration into unknown places, when he was old and had settled on a piece of land, to enjoy in peace his old age, was gypped out of the land by some big land company. The big land companies were one of the earliest forms of American graft. Even the immortal Washington got in on that racket.

  The early mountain man, coming in, picked himself a place with a bit of creek or river bottom. Hundreds and even thousands of cold mountain streams flowed down out of the hills. They were alive with trout. The forests were full of game. There was enough grass... the nutritious blue grass in the limestone hill... to feed a cow, a team of oxen or a horse. Pigs could be marked and turned loose to roam in the forest and in good years they grew fat on the fallen acorns.

  A life that would have seemed barren to many Americans, in a land where riches came so rapidly, so much flat land, easily farmed, land to be had for the taking in an earlier day. Mark Twain’s writing of th
e Tennessee land in “The Golden Age”... queer creatures, the mountaineers, so listless, so ignorant... nothing said about the beauty of Tennessee hills. Would they produce coal, would they produce iron? What other use is there for such land?

  To city men, town men, men of fat Middle-Western farms, such a land would seem of no use. But there was something else to be said. Did not Thomas Jefferson declare that the best government was the least government? There was independence. Your mountain man did not bend the knee. “Treat me with the respect due to my manhood or..

  “Or, or, or.”

  Life was hard but good, too. A mountain man, grown lean and hard in a hard land on hard fare, thought nothing of walking twenty-five miles over mountain trails, through the thick laurel, under the great trees, to some tiny settlement, to bring home tobacco, salt and sugar. He went with his “passel of ginseng,” called ‘‘sang,” or with a few hens in a “poke,” slung over his shoulder. There was something mysterious about the wild sang. It was wanted, a good price would be paid for it, by some far-off people. The people who wanted it might have been living in Mars. The mountain man didn’t know, didn’t ask. In many of the mountain cabins, mere huts, the doors were left swinging open winter and summer. Hens came indoors and laid eggs on the beds or under the beds. The mountain man’s children had fixed a place for hens to set in a corner of his one-room house. His pig wandered in and out at the open door. You can house-break a pig, too.

  Suspicion of government deeply rooted. Again: “What right has government to say my children shall go to school? What do we need of book-larnin’? What has government done for me? I myself have no book-larnin’, cannot read or write, but am I not a man in my place?” Tom Halsey, the man who became a mountain gang leader... he was a rather small compactly built quiet man... blue-black hair, black sharp eyes, an upshoot out of his people, more cunning, perhaps cruel, determined, ambitious. How he got his power over other men and, when he wished it, over women, no one knew. He could remember when, as a boy, he went, for the first time, with his father and other men to a town.