And at that moment the door that led to Tom’s room opened and, accompanied by three other men, Tom came into the room. They came silently, the three men going to stand by the wall near the door and Tom standing in the doorway. Kit had a thought. She always afterwards remembered it. As Tom had come out of the bedroom, accompanied by his killers, so a man named Wyagle had come out of a barn, in an open place in a wood. “Wyagle’s dead now,” Kit thought. She had a sudden sharp feeling, a hunch. Not herself but Tom Halsey was going to die. She did not think of herself now as the killer.
An absurd thing happened. There was Gordon, sitting like that on the couch and he sprang to his feet. He sat down and again sprang up. “Oh, Papa. Hello, Papa,” he said. His voice was high and shrill. He said it three or four times and then again slumped into the chair and sat as before with eyes closed.
It was absurd, ridiculous. It was to Kit something almost wonderful. She laughed aloud and got to her feet. If she had had a desire, a determination to kill Tom it had left her. To her, at the moment, it seemed a final, a kind of absolute humiliation of the man Halsey. “And so... you are the leader of a gang... you have bad men, killers about you...
“You are Tom Halsey, the strong quiet one.”
Her thoughts were broken by the voice of Tom, speaking to her. He spoke sharply. “And so he will now take it out on me because his son is like that,” she thought.
“If there were any chance that he would not have wanted me killed he will now. He will want killed every one who is now in this room.”
“Come here, Kit,” Tom said sharply, a new note of exasperation in his voice. She walked toward him and when she had got to where the men were standing by the wall, they stepped forward and pinned her arms to her side. One of them reached into her coat pocket and took the gun she had brought from the hotel, the gun she was to have used to shoot Tom. “And so,” she thought, “his Kate has sharp eyes.”
Kate would have noticed the bulge in her short coat when she had let her into the house. She stood, held thus, before Tom who half turned, as though to lead the way into the bedroom. She would be led out that way through Tom’s room and Kate’s kitchen. She would be taken outside, killed out there, her body thrown into a car. “I guess maybe they’ll choke me.” She stood silently and there were the absurd words uttered by Tom’s son running through her head.
“Oh, Papa. Hello, Papa.” Kit had to control herself to keep from throwing the words into Tom’s face. She stood before him smiling.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THERE WAS A diversion. It was all really very simple. Kit was there in that place, facing Tom, the men holding her. There was no violence. They held her and she didn’t resist. She stood, still smiling at Tom, really wanting to laugh...
“Oho, big man, bad man, with your gang of other bad men, killers!”
The fellows holding Kit were certainly ugly enough looking brutes.
“Can a man be a brute and a killer and have a sense of humor?”
Kit’s husband back there, was now sunk helplessly back on the couch. He was still holding the gun in his hand. “Papa! Papa!”
Kit wanted to shout the words at Tom, throw them into his teeth. She looked hard at him and smiled. Perhaps he didn’t see the smile in that light. He would be annoyed, humiliated.
“So this, Tom Halsey, is the son, at whose hands you are to establish a family, get the Halseys up into the ranks of respectables, establish an American family?”
Perhaps.
“Oho, oho!”
Men all over America struggling. “You wait. First I’ll get rich and then I’ll do something.”
“I am a business man. I will work and scheme, pay workers who work for me as little as possible. I’ll get rich. Then I’ll become a man of leisure, travel, see the world, get culture.
“I will establish a family.”
“I am an artist, a painter. I’ll show you how to do it. The game is to paint portraits of rich men or their wives. Flatter them, if they are business men make them look strong-jawed, steady-eyed...
“Fix up their daughters or their wives. Boy, you know how to make them look.
“Buckle on to the dough. Get it. Put it away. Then become a real painter, eh.”
“I am a writer. Hurra! The thing is to go in for the pulps, or go out to Hollywood. You can get a thousand a week out there.
“Look. It is like this with me. I am really, you see, a man of the people. I love the working classes. At heart I am a communist.
“I will go out there, get some of this dough.
“Then I will devote myself and my talents to the cause of the down-trodden.
“The Workers! The Workers! Oh, in my heart, how I love the workers.”
It is of course absurd to think of the woman Kit, at that time not yet thirty, very slender, very straight-standing... not in the popular American Hollywood sense beautiful, but in her own way beautiful enough, with, at the moment, certainly, a fine dignity, quite convinced that, perhaps within a few minutes, she would be wiped out, disposed of, possibly in some rather brutal manner... caring certainly... not certainly at the moment afraid.
Certainly in her, at the moment, rich contempt. Is it in many, many American women, making out of modern America something like a matriarchy... so many men success-ridden, touch lost with the real sources of manhood?
The thought of Gordon’s cry to his father taken up, spread through his gang. If you are a general commanding armies, leader of an American gang, a Hitler, a Mussolini, you must not let yourself be put in a ridiculous position.
In the room there was this moment, Kit’s great moment, and then Kate, who during all this had been in her kitchen, came rapidly into the room and crossing to Tom spoke to him, saying some words Kit did not hear.
It may be that Tom was confused. He started quickly across the room and then turned and spoke to the men who were holding Kit. “Come here,” he said and led the way into the kitchen, leaving Kit standing... her gun had been taken... alone again in the room with Gordon.
She did not look back at Gordon but went through the door and into Tom’s bedroom. There was another dim light in there and on the bed she saw a rope. “So they had intended to bind her.” She was to have been thrown thus into a car, taken somewhere by two or three of Tom’s roughs... no doubt insulted, perhaps violated, killed, her body thrown into some thicket. She had brought the little handbag from the hotel and it was in the room where Gordon sat, on the couch in there, and she went in and got it.
Gordon still sat dumbly on the couch but spoke to her in a loud whisper. “What are they going to do?” he asked but she did not answer.
She returned to Tom’s room, having no plan. There was a window in the room and she went to it, ran up the shade and tried to open it but it was apparently nailed shut. She pushed with all her strength and then gave up. There was the sound of low voices coming from Kate’s kitchen and she went and stood near the door, having some vague idea of a struggle. If Tom and his men came in through the door she would, the moment the door was opened, rush at them. She would scratch and bite, would fight them. “I might as well get done with it,” she thought. They might kill her at once.
There was no more sound of the voices coming from the kitchen and she went quietly through the door and through the kitchen and got outside.
It was all a miracle to her. There she was. In one moment she had been quite sure she was to die and now there she was, out of that house, the hands of those men no longer holding her. It was quite dark and she slid carefully along the side of the house to a corner and stood waiting.
The moments passed. As often happens with people in sudden danger she had been quite cool but now her body began to tremble and her legs were so weak that she sat for a moment, her back against the wall of the building. It was a dark night with rain threatening and she could see nothing. A wind, such a sudden wind as often precedes a rain, came up and she could hear it in the branches of the trees in the apple orchard back of the
house.
She did not know afterwards how long she waited thus. It may have been but for a minute. There was only the sound of the sudden wind in the trees and then, from the orchard and from the road in front of the house, there came the sound of shots and she could see the little sputter of light made by the discharge of guns.
It was at that moment that Gordon Halsey came rushing out of the house, coming as she had through the kitchen door.
He was shouting but this time he did not address his father as “Papa.”
“Father, father,” he cried, and plunged into the darkness toward the orchard and the shots.
Kit did not stay. She ran. Dodging across a little strip of lawn beside the house, she forced her way through a low hedge, and got into a field. She ran along, keeping parallel to the road and came presently to where there was a wood, also near the road. There had been a raid planned by federal men, Kate’s house no doubt watched for days... Kit didn’t know how many of Tom’s men had been at or near the house when she came there with Gordon.
There were many things she didn’t know. In the wood near the road were several cars parked... the cars that had brought the federal men from town... and there was a man standing near one of the cars, the lights out but the engine running. She could hear the soft steady purr of the motor, a sound that had always thrilled her, that had always made her feel strong, as though a motor might be, well, say something of what a husband might be to her, and as she stood, unseen, unheard, watching the man intently, his form but dimly seen, her mind racing, he turned on the lights of the car and walked away from it, down along a short woodland path and into the road. It was the road that ran down to Kate’s house and he stood there listening. He had heard the sound of the shots.
Kit didn’t hesitate. She ran to the car and jumped into the driver’s seat. “The luck’s with me tonight,” she thought.
The car went with a roar into the road and turned away from the direction of Kate’s house. It was a good car. Kit felt that. She almost struck the federal man standing there in the road. “Look out — you fool.” She didn’t say it. “Hey! Hey!” he cried. As she flashed past him she saw him pull a gun out of its holster but he didn’t shoot. He had been taken off guard. He might have thought she was one of the federal men, going into town, say for a doctor or an ambulance. There had been the sound of the shooting.
Kit didn’t know what the man thought. She was at the wheel of a good, a powerful car. She drove furiously. She did not know until later that several of Tom’s men were taken that night and that Tom was killed.
He was killed by his own son. Gordon had been overcome with fright, finding himself alone in the house. Some one of Tom’s men, a watcher, had crept to the kitchen door and had warned Kate of the coming of the federal men. It had been a case of all the men in the house and others, who had evidently been waiting outside, trying each to save himself. They had tried to creep away in the darkness and some of them had succeeded but Tom Halsey had found himself facing two of the federal men.
This had happened in the apple orchard back of the house and he had turned to run, the federal men shooting at him. He had thought to do as Kit did, get through the hedge that ran alongside the house and into the fields but, as he ran, two or three of the federal men at his heels, he had met his son, now more and more frightened, gone half insane with fright and Gordon had fired.
He had shot his own father and having done so plunged into the arms of the men pursuing and with his father, who died in a hospital in town the next day, was taken a prisoner to town.
There were several cars loaded with prisoners and among them Kate. She had been found, seen by the light of a flashlight, standing, as Kit had stood earlier, with her back to the wall of the house. She had no gun. As she had been, so habitually silent for so long during her life with Tom Halsey, so, after her arrest and during the trial of other members of Tom’s crowd and herself, she remained. She said nothing. “I know nothing,” she said. Like Gordon Halsey she was sent off for a term in prison. The fact that the bullet that killed Tom Halsey entered his body from the front as he ran from the federal men made it quite certain that it was the son who had killed Tom Halsey.
CHAPTER TWENTY
KIT WAS IN a little wood. As the mountain men said, she was “in the laurel.” The wood was in a hill country, north of the town where Kate had lived and from which Kit had escaped. She took it for granted that Kate and perhaps, for all she knew, all the rest of Tom’s crowd were in jail. It was not until some time later that she learned of Tom’s death. She hadn’t gone very far in the police car, driving it some thirty or forty miles and then leaving it beside a country road. She had struck out afoot.
She had some money, some three hundred dollars... she counted it at daybreak sitting in the wood. Fortunately she had clung to the little bag and had with her the black dress and the black sunbonnet and she put these on. It was the sort of garb you sometimes see on poor country women. Such a woman buys such a dress... it may be she has lost a child... it is a convention; it is also necessary to dress in black at a funeral. Afterwards it becomes her “best” dress. She wears it when she goes to town, when she goes to church. Kit put the suit and short coat she had worn when she went to Kate’s house in the little bag and hid it in the wood. All of this was on the morning of her escape.
She felt free and was happy. For weeks she had been wanting to give up the life she had been in. She had held on wanting, in her own curiously tenacious way, to get even with Tom Halsey, do something to him, to pay him out for what he had done to young Weathersmythe. She had tried to think and talk herself out of that feeling but hadn’t succeeded. “What is it to me? What have I to do with it?”
There had been something that held her and she had even gone to the length of wanting to kill Tom with her own hands, to shoot him, stand and watch him die and now the feeling was all gone. It had been unpleasant enough.
She did not know that he was dead... did not find that out until, in a restaurant in a small near-by town, she picked up a newspaper and read the story of Tom’s death. The son, her husband, was in jail.
There was, in the same morning newspaper, a reference to herself. She had escaped but the officers were on her track. There was nothing said about her having run off with the car belonging to the federal man. That story would have made them look too soft and easy, she thought. She had a feeling, common among habitual law-breakers, of contempt for all officers of the law. Even in the popular detective stories her husband had been fond of reading, the law officers were usually fools. It might well be that the federal man in the road when she had run out of the wood with the federal car had not recognized her. The newspaper story she read said nothing of her being at Kate’s house when the raid was made. “The notorious Kit Halsey was not taken but the police know of her whereabouts and it is expected she will be taken in a few days.”
Kit felt again a sudden sharp sting of bitter loneliness. “The notorious Kit Halsey... the police know of her whereabouts.” How men like to talk, bluff, say things that they think will make them seem wise and important.
Kit had come into the town after changing her clothes in the wood. “What shall I do now? Where shall I go?” She had come out of the wood and got into the road, this in the early morning. She had looked carefully about. There was no one in sight. What a clear sweet morning! The wood into which she had got on the evening before was on a high plateau. It was fall and the leaves on the trees in the wood and on other strips of woodland beyond were turning yellow and red but they had not begun to fall. She stood looking about. It was just such a country as that in which she had lived as a child, the same great hills going away, little farms stuck on hillsides. She was in the Appalachian hill country, her own country. On the night before, in the police car, she had driven blindly, not thinking, not caring where she went. There had been just the mad desire to get away from Tom, from Gordon... yes and from Kate. “I want something new now.” The feeling common to thousands of yo
ung men and women in a civilization dominated by commercialism. “I don’t want to buy and sell. I want to do some work that has some meaning.”
It was good to be abroad in the fresh morning air. Not during that day, nor the next, when her adventures in that particular place ended, did she have much fear of being found and taken by the officers of the law. She had a hunch, a feeling. “No, they won’t find me. I won’t be taken.” From where she stood, in the upland road, she could look down into a broad valley where there was a town. “I’ll go down and get something to eat.” She went along the road and got to a paved road that led into the town. Cars kept passing her. She had seen the chimney of a factory from the road above and as it was early morning she concluded that the cars, all rather shabby looking, must belong to country men, mountain men who were employed in the town’s factory. None of the drivers offered to pick her up and she went on into the town and stopped before a small hotel, near a railroad station.
There was a restaurant, very evil smelling, dead flies under the windows, and run by a fat man in a very dirty white coat. She went in. She thought, “I’ll get on a train and go somewhere.
“But where?”
A fat dirty-looking man with fat dirty hands was standing across a counter from her and she ordered some coffee and sat at a soiled table. “No, I won’t have anything to eat.” The morning newspaper was lying on a table. It was then she read of Tom’s death and the taking of the others.
There was a little adventure in the restaurant. Kit had no change and gave the man a twenty-dollar bill and he stood looking at her and whistling. “You get it changed for me. I want some change,” she said and he crossed to the railroad station but presently came back saying he could not get the change. Several times he had looked directly at her. The black dress she had bought at the rummage sale was really shabby. It was worn and faded and fitted her loosely. She wore the black sunbonnet but the restaurant man could look directly into her face. She met his gaze calmly. An idea came to her. “Is there a train going north from here this morning?” she asked, having some notion of going to some city, perhaps in Ohio... she had often taken liquor into the larger Ohio towns... Ohio, the home state of the antisaloon league, had always been one of the bigger consuming states.... “I want to go to Columbus, Ohio,” she said, but the man said the morning train had already gone and that there would not be another before evening. “You’ll have to take the six-eighteen tonight by Cincinnati.”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 204