So there was this man and his family and it was a summer day and the family were at work in a field. The field was far from the Lawler home and was at the very top of a high hill. It was flat up there and the field was new land. There had been a stand of timber but it had been killed by the process known as “ringing.” In the upper field, where the Lawler family were at work, there was a whole forest of such trees. Dead trees standing up thus put out no leaves. They turn gray. After a time they tremble in every wind. There are no masses of leaves to keep the warm sun from the good earth. The trees are but the ghosts of trees.
To break up such new ground, under the trees, between the standing trees, is heavy and laborious work. The plow point catches upon tree roots, there is a tangle of the roots of smaller trees and bushes. The work in the field had been done and the field planted to corn. The young corn was ready to be hoed but Ike Lawler did not stay in the field. He had his wife up there, one of the girl children and the young Joseph. Joseph was then a boy of twelve and was thin and sickly. He spent his days being frightened and his nights having strange dreams. It was because of religion. Going to meeting was almost the only diversion for the mountain people and there had been a series of meetings in a little church in the neighborhood.
Ike Lawler did not stay that day in the upper field. He had others of his children at work in other fields. “I want this field all worked out by tonight,” he said. The fat old mother was again pregnant. She grunted as she worked. At noon there was, for each of the workers, a slab of cold corn bread.
It was a hot day and as the afternoon began to grow long there was, on the part of all three of the workers, a growing fear that the field would not be finished. They did not speak of it. They worked more and more hurriedly and feverishly. The thin-legged sickly boy Joseph may have gone a little off his head. He began talking aloud to himself, “Am I one of God’s children or am I not?” he asked. “Will God some day speak to me? If I die suddenly will I go to Heaven or will I go to hell? Will God speak to me as he did to Paul on the road to Damascus?”
It may be that he had begun to have ambitious dreams. In the mountain churches men spoke of the call, direct from God, to God’s ministry.
There was a storm, coming quickly as storms do in high mountain places. There were black clouds creeping up over distant mountain ridges, plainly seen from the upper field. The black masses of clouds became spread out. They covered the sky.
It remained very still, very hot in the field. There was rapid movement in the masses of black clouds overhead while down below all was still. It would have been well for the mother and children if they had run into a near-by wood, where the trees were still strong and alive or down the mountain toward their home. They didn’t dare. The old mother, heavy with child, went along the rows, working desperately, groaning, under the tall ghosts of trees, the children following, Joseph muttering. The girl child had begun to cry.
There was another quick change. It had been still and hot in the field but suddenly a cold wind began to blow and every moment it increased in violence. It made a low whining noise rushing through the branches of the bare dead trees and at once smaller branches began to break and fall. They were carried along by the racing wind.
The whole scene was like a stage set. The three people had been working with frightened abandon but they suddenly stopped and stood. Branches from the dead trees began flying past them and with every minute the violence of the wind increased. Now the black mass of clouds overhead was torn into ribbons.
As the three stood, carried suddenly thus out of one fear... the fear of not getting the work done... into this new fear, fear of the husband and father on the one side and God fear on the other... the father Ike Lawler appeared.
He had been at the house of a neighbor, one of his own stripe, and had been drinking there. He had traded horses and was astride a great awkward work horse he had got, a horse very huge and very bony. He was beating the horse with his whip as he rode down toward his family.
Being rather drunk, he was without fear of the storm. So he had told the wife, son, and daughter to finish the field and now night was coming and it was not finished. He had mistaken the blackness that had settled down over the field for night. “Why, what are you doing here? Why are you standing and loafing? To Work, I tell you, to work,” he yelled, riding down upon them. If he was not frightened the horse was. It was a huge, awkward, bony old work-horse but had become mad and unmanageable with fright. It reared, stood on its hind legs, grotesquely.
The masses of black and gray clouds fell down over the scene. They became a dirty flying gray mist that hid the horse and rider from the three workers and then the rain came with an even louder roar of wind.
It was a bedlam and Joseph Lawler always remembered the scene afterwards. When he became a mountain preacher and told of it the scene grew more and more wonderful. He said that there was the man, representing evil, roaring in the storm and that there was a moment when the wind blew a little clear place in the blackness and that, standing and trembling, he heard the voice and saw the face of God. He declared that God spoke clearly to him but what it was that God said to him he would not tell. He grew mysterious. “It is not to be told. The words of God are not to be told to mortal ears,” he said. The horse, with its rider, the horse maddened by fright and by the lash of Ike Lawler’s whip, rode down upon the others and the girl child, Joseph Lawler’s sister, was knocked down and hurt. Later she died of the hurt.
The great wind was blowing down the dead trees. They began falling. The trees were like rows of dominoes set up on the floor by a child at play. One domino, at the end, is touched by the child’s finger and down they all come. The falling limb of a great tree struck Ike Lawler and knocked him from his horse. He was badly hurt and later, after the mother, who by some miracle escaped, had got down out of the field and had brought neighbor men, he was carried to his house.
And where was the boy Joseph? How significant! Several men of the neighborhood brought up there by the mother found him, and even Ike Lawler was impressed by their story. Two great trees had fallen making a gigantic cross and there was the boy apparently stunned... it may have been no more than fright... he was uninjured... he may have climbed to the position in which he was found. He lay very still and white. As he lay thus he was exactly the figure of the Christ on the cross. He was unconscious but when a man picked him from the cross he spoke. “I saw God,” he said, quietly enough. “God took care of me. He spoke to me in the storm.”
It was enough. To the mountain people, even to his father, Joseph Lawler became something special. More and more, as he grew into young manhood, he lived a life apart from others and devoted himself to God. He became a boy preacher, speaking and exhorting in the streets of mountain towns and in cabins. He came along a mountain road and stopped before a cabin. “Come out. Come out, he called, “God is calling to you,” and when the people had come out of the house he knelt in the road and prayed loudly for the people of the house.
He began to get a small following, among others the mountain girl Kate, who became his wife. She was the woman Tom Halsey had perhaps seen, after she had lost her child, sitting by the door of her house and looking out over the hills. She had followed her preacher husband in his wanderings over the hills... at first he called himself a Baptist but later he adopted the Holiness faith... and there were several others, among them two old men and a half insane old woman. The little cavalcade took pilgrimages, sometimes lasting for several days or weeks, through the hills. At night they would stop before some isolated cabin. Joseph Lawler had become more and more sure of himself, more and more imperious. He demanded food for himself and his followers and a place for them to sleep. “It is God’s wish,” he said. He had grown constantly more and more adept as an interpreter of God’s wishes.
Kate was his wife — or mistress. The young preacher had not been legally married to his woman. “God has married us,” he said to her and to the others among his followers.
He was at home on the little farm he had got... this some days after his wife’s death. He did not remember how much time had passed. His mother had come to his new home to take care of the babe. He was in trouble. As has been suggested, several patent foods, recommended by a country doctor and got from a drug store in a distant town, had proved ineffectual and his child was starving.
He was at work one day in his field but suddenly stopped work. He stood gazing at the sky. “There is no use crying out to God.” He told Kit later that he did not remember much of what happened to him that day. It was late afternoon and he had been hoeing corn. “God takes care of the man who takes care of himself.”
“God is on the side of the big battalions.” Anyway Tom Halsey was not literary. “If I stand here like this my babe, my son, will also die.” He threw his hoe into a fence corner and started toward his house. He got down to his barn and saddled a horse. “There is needed a woman who can nurse my son.” He may have heard that the woman Kate had lost her babe. He mounted the horse and called to his mother. “Mother, you bring me the babe.”
His mother protested. “What are you going to do, Tom? The baby is too sick to be moved.”
She had come to the door of the house with the sickly, starved child in her arms. He did not answer but, getting off the horse, went to her and took the child from her arms. The mother stood in the little yard before Tom’s mountain cabin protesting violently, but without another word to her and with the child in his arms he mounted his horse and rode away.
The young preacher, of the Holiness faith, whose following had grown, had got himself a tent in which he held meetings, moving from place to place through the mountains. He was holding meetings in a field, near his own home, at the time when Tom Halsey set out with his babe in his arms. Tom was not very clear as to what had happened to him during the late afternoon and early evening of that day. He may just have ridden rather blindly about.
And in the little tent the preacher had got, there was a meeting being held. The preacher’s wife, the woman Kate, was there. She was a little ill. Her breasts were hurting. The tent, a ragged dirty one, without walls, was a mere shelter.
It had been pitched close beside a road and was filled with mountain people. They sat, with heavy serious faces. The preacher had for a light a sputtering kerosene torch, hung from the ceiling of the tent, and the light from it played over the faces.
It played over the face of the young preacher. He was exhorting. He half wept. He shouted. Little flecks of spittle formed in the corners of his mouth. There were groans from the audience. A wailing woman’s voice arose. “Oh, God, God, look down on me... speak to me as you once spoke to him,” she cried. The preacher had again told the story of the storm and of his own direct and personal contact with God. He told it at every meeting, the story always growing and growing. The meeting that night had not really got well going. Presently it would be better. God’s spirit would manifest itself. There would be screams, women rolling on the ground, cries from the throats of men.
The meeting was however spoiled. Tom Halsey, the sick child in his arms, rode along the road beside which the tent was pitched. He stopped his horse and getting down came into the tent with the child in his arms. He also may have been temporarily a little off his head. He had been passionately devoted to his wife. He stood in the tent, under the sputtering light, looking about, and then went to where the preacher’s wife sat, rather apart from all the others. She was on the very front one of the rude benches. The benches were but rough boards laid on logs.
Tom went to the woman and sat beside her and immediately the thing happened. He began to look steadily at Kate and she at him. It was as though they spoke. It may be she did not look at Tom but at the babe. “My own babe has been torn from my arms by death. Come to my arms, come to my breast, thou hungry one.” She became fascinated, staring, and the preacher, looking down at her and at Tom Halsey, was profoundly disturbed.
Well, and what of him?
It may be that thoughts rushed through the woman’s mind. He had said that God had taken their child and had seemed almost cheerful about it. It was another thing to speak about in his sermons. “God wants me to go on doing His glorious work. He has taken my child, a little saint now in Heaven, to have there, as a shining thing, a shining light to me.”
And so... bitter thoughts perhaps in the mind of the woman, the mother, sitting and hearing his words, a bitter hurting in her breast. As she stared at Tom and at the sick babe he held in his arms, tears came to her eyes.
And then Tom Halsey did something. He arose. He stood before the woman. The preacher, on his little raised platform, stopped speaking and a hush fell over the audience. The woman was clad in a simple cotton gown that buttoned down the front and Tom reached down and began to unbutton it. She did not move but when he put the child to her breast, an ecstatic look came into her eyes.
There was a commotion. The preacher’s words died on his lips and he sprang down from his raised place and stood before Tom and the woman. “Well,” he said. He had gone white. His mouth opened and closed. As for Tom and the woman... it was as though they had both suddenly become aware that what had happened... such a personal, such a private matter... had happened in a public place. The woman arose, the child still at the breast and stood beside Tom. She was staring now, in a half-dazed way, about the room and at her husband. With the man, her husband, that God man, she had once followed blindly, with blind faith, like the others in the tent... all now staring at her with fixed stares of astonishment... she had nothing to do. With Tom Halsey she could live again. He was connected with the child in her arms, at her breasts. The young preacher continued to stand, his mouth opening and closing. “Kate,” he said, but she did not answer, did not look at him. She was looking at Tom, as though expectant. “What now?” She did not speak. She stood waiting.
She did not have to wait long. “Come on,” Tom said, and led the way out of the tent, the preacher following. Men and women of the audience arose from their seats and followed. Tom led the way to where the horse was tethered and helping her on again put the babe into her arms. He sprang into the saddle before her. “Put your arm about me,” he said, “you won’t fall.” The preacher had fallen to his knees in the dust of the road and was crying out to his God. “Don’t let her go away with him. God, don’t let her go,” he cried.
The astonished people stood in silence as Tom and the woman Kate rode away into the darkness.
CHAPTER NINE
THERE WAS ANOTHER adventure coming Kit Brandon’s way before the big adventure of marriage. She had begun her flight... young, pretty, good-looking American woman on the move. She hadn’t as yet gone very far, in a certain direction. There had been an alive pert little one, named Sarah, she had known in the cotton mill.
“Life’s a game.”
“Play to win.”
“Learn to use what you’ve got.”
“If you don’t put it over on them they’ll put it over on you.”
She had got the American restlessness all right. Young American working man, factory hand.... “Say Bill, I’m going to pull my freight out of here. I’m going to Baltimore... to Frisco... to Cleveland... to Kansas City... I hear it’s swell out there.”
Labor turnover in more than one American factory as high as fifty, sixty, seventy-five per cent in a year. The word is that they have the same problem over in Russia.
As for the matter of a “certain direction,” that’s putting it delicately enough, eh?... Kit didn’t count a certain threatened happening with her own father... by a certain mountain stream... after bathing... being bathed by the hands of another... in soft evening light when she was a child. It might have happened then, but it didn’t.
She got out of the cotton-mill town suddenly one hot summer day, took a train to another indu
strial town of the upper South, got a job in a shoe factory there. They always manage to make a place for the young pretty fairly well-dressed ones, if they look strong enough to stand up to it. Kit had got the faculty, the trick — it is born in some women — of wearing clothes. There are some of them, as the saying goes, who can take almost any kind of rag, put it on, make it look like Park Avenue. She had it. It was partly study and observation. She had even changed her way of walking, of carrying her body, holding her head, getting a certain dignity and grace. As they say of colts at the race tracks, she was about ready to go to the races.
As for the shoe-factory town... she always thought of it afterwards only in this way as... “that place where the shoe factory is.” It was a big town, set on the side of a hill. There were big hills, really mountains, climbing up back of the town and you were always going up and down hills. You stood in one of the streets and looked down on the roofs of the houses in the next street below. Far down below there was a river, very charming sometimes to see from above... the factory was down near the river and near railroad tracks... the river gleaming gold sometimes when the sun was setting, red sometimes, sometimes a dirty yellow, sometimes when the sky was overcast, steel gray. Kit didn’t notice it much. She had a room with an Italian woman in a street also down near the river. The woman had left her husband and had a son, a clerk in a grocery store, who lived with his mother and he at once began trying to “make” Kit. He didn’t get far although the mother was always singing his praises. “I tell you he’s a good boy.” He was a man of twenty-seven and unmarried. “When he was in school he was always the smartest one in his class.” The father who had kept a fruit store had got into trouble with a married woman and, in danger of being shot, had fled and she had got a divorce. The woman wanted her son to marry and have children. “I like children about.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 188